The bride wore black

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

For to kill is the great law set by nature in the heart of existence! There is nothing more beautiful and honorable than killing!

DE Maupassant

INTRODUCTION BY FRANCIS M. NEVINS, JR.

Nc

OIR.

Any French dictionary will tell you that the word's primary meaning is black, dark or gloomy. But since the mid-1940s and when used with the noun roman (novel) OT film, the adjective has developed a specialized meaning, referring to the kind of bleak, disillusioned study in the poetry of terror that flourished in American mystery fiction during the 1930s and 1940s and in American crime movies during the fonies and fifties. The hallmarks of the noir style are fear, guilt and loneliness, breakdown and despair, sexual obsession and social corruption, a sense that the world is controlled by malignant forces preying on us, a rejection of happy endings and a preference for resolutions hea\y with doom, but always redeemed by a breathtakingly vivid poetry of word (if the work was a novel or story) or image (if it was a movie).

During the 1940s many American books of this sort were published in French translation m a long-running series called the Serie Soire, and at the end of World War II, when French film enthusiasts were exposed for the first time to Hollywood's cinematic analogue of those books, they coined yT/m noir as a phrase to describe the genre. What Americans of those years tended to dismiss as commercial entertainments the French saw as profound explorations of the heart of darkness, largely be-

Viil INTRODUCTION

cause noir was so intimately related to the themes of French existentialist writers like Sartre and Camus, and because the bleak world of noir spoke to the despair that so many in Europe were experiencing after the nightmare years of war and occupation and genocide. By the early 1960s cinephiles in the United States had virtually made an American phrase out oi film noir and had acclaimed this type of movie as one of the most fascinating genres to emerge from Hollywood. Noir directors not only the giants, like Alfred Hitchcock (in certain moods) and Fritz Lang, but relative unknowns, like Edgar G. Ulmer, Jacques Tourneur, Robert Siodmak, Joseph H. Lewis and Anthony Mann were hailed as visual poets whose cinematic style made the bleakness of their films not only palatable but fantastically exciting.

Several first-rate books on this movie genre have recently been published in the United States [thel)est is Foster Hirsch's Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir (1981)], and one can attend courses on film noir at any number of colleges. But there has not yet developed a corresponding interest in the doom-haunted novels and tales of suspense in which film noir had its roots. Although Raymond Chandler, the poet of big-city corruption, and James M. Cain, the chronicler of sexual obsession, have received the fame they deserve, the names of countless other noir writers are known only to specialists.

Names like Cornell Woolrich.

WooLRiCH WAS BORN on December 4, 1903, to parents whose marriage collapsed in his youth. Much of his childhood was spent in Mexico with his father, a civil engineer. At age eight, the experience of seeing a traveling French company perform Puccini's Madame Butterfly in Mexico City gave Woolrich a sudden sharp insight into color and drama and his first sense of

tragedy. Three years later he understood fully that someday like Cio-Cio-San he too would have to die, and from then on he was haunted by a sense of doom that never left him.

During adolescence he lived with his mother and maternal relatives in New York City, and in 1921 he entered Columbia College, where he began writing fiction. He then quit school in his junior year to pursue his dream of becoming another F. Scott Fitzgerald. His first novel, Cover Charge (1926), chronicled the lives and loves of the Jazz Age's gilded youth in the manner of his and his whole generation's literary idol. This book was followed by the prize-winning Children of the Ritz (1927), whose success propelled Woolrich to Hollywood as a screenwriter, a job at which he failed, and into a brief marriage, at which he failed even worse. Before long he fled back to New York and his mother. For the next quarter century he Hved with her in residential hotels, going out only when it was absolutely essential, trapped in a bizarre love-hate relationship that dominated his external world just as the inner world of his later fiction reflects in its tortured patterns the strangler grip in which his mother and his own inability to love a woman held him.

From 1934 until his death, in 1968, this tormented recluse all but created what we know as noir, writing dozens of haunting tales of suspense, despair and lost love, set in a universe controlled by diabolical powers. During the thirties his work appeared only in pulp magazines like Black Mask and Detective Fiction Weekly. Then, beginning with The Bride Wore Black (1940), he launched his so-called Black Series of suspense novels which appeared in France as part of the Serie Noire and led the French to acclaim him as a master of bleak poetic vision. Much of his reputation still rests on those novels and on the other suspense classics originally published under his pseudonyms William Irish and George Hop-

ley. Throughout the forties and fifties Woolrich's publishers issued numerous hardcover and paperback collections of his short stories. Many of his novels and tales were adapted into movies, including such fine films noirs as Tourneur's Leopard Man (1943), Siodmak's Phantom lady (1944), Roy William Neill's Black Angel (1946), Maxwell Shane's Fear in the Night (1947) and, most famous of all, Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954). Even more of Woolrich's work was turned into radio and later into television drama. But despite overwhelming financial and critical success his life remained a wretched mess, and when his mother died, in 1957, he cracked. From then until his own death, eleven years later, he lived alone, his last year spent in a wheelchair after the amputation of a gangrenous leg, wracked by diabetes and alcoholism and homosexual self-contempt. But the best of his final "tales of love and despair" are still gifted with the magic touch that chills our hearts, and in a title for a story he never wrote he captured the essence of his world and the world of noir in six words. First you dream, then you die.

WooLRiCH WROTE ALL SORTS of storics, including quasi-pohce procedural, rapid-action whizbangs, and tales of the occult. But he is best known as the master of pure suspense, the writer who could evoke with awesome power the desperation of those who walk the city's darkened streets and the terror that lurks at noonday in the most commonplace settings. In his hands even such chched storylines as the race to save the innocent person from the electric chair and the amnesiac hunting his lost self resonate with human anguish. Woolrich's world is a feverish place where the prevailing emotions are loneliness and fear and the prevailing action as in his classics "Three O'Clock" (1938) and "Guillotine" (1939) is the

race against time and death. His most characteristic detective stories end with the realization that no rational account of events is possible, and his suspense stories tend to close with omnipresent terror.

The typical Woolrich settings are the seedy hotel, the cheap dance hall, the rundown movie house, and the precinct station backroom. The dominant reality in his world is the Depression, and Woolrich has no peers when it comes to describing a frightened little guy in a tiny apartment with no money, no job, a hungry wife and children, and anxiety eating him like a cancer. If a Woolrich protagonist is in love, the beloved is likely to vanish in such a way that the protagonist not only can't find her but can't convince anyone she ever existed. Or, in another classic Woolrich situation, the protagonist comes to after a blackout caused by amnesia, drugs, hypnosis, or whatever and little by little becomes certain that he committed a murder or other crime while not himself. The police are rarely sympathetic; in fact, they are the earthly counterparts of the malignant powers above, and their main function is to torment the helpless.

All we can do about this nightmare we live in is to create, if we are very lucky, a few islands of love and trust to sustain us and help us forget. But love dies while the lovers go on Hving, and Woolrich excels at making us watch relationships corrode. He knew the horrors that both love and lovelessness can breed, yet he created very few irredeemably evil characters; for Woolrich identifies with whoever either loves or needs love, all of that person's dark side notwithstanding.

. As purely technical exercises, many of Woolrich's novels and stories are awful. They don't make the slightest bit of sense. And that, of course, is the point. Neither does life. Nevertheless, some of his tales, usually

thanks to outlandish coincidence, manage to end quite happily. But since he never used a series character, the reader can never know in advance whether a panicular Woolrich story will be light or dark, alvegre or noir which is one of many reasons why his stories are so hauntingly suspenseful.

Like The Bride Wore Black.

At the end of the 1930s, after half a dozen years of writing nothing but short fiction for the pulp magazines, Woolrich made the transition that several other pulp veterans like Raymond Chandler, Frank Gruber, and Cleve F. Adams were making at about the same time the transition from luridly illustrated periodicals to hardcover crime novels. If one doesn't count the 1932 Manhattan Love Song, which was published as a mainstream title but would be labeled crime fiction today. The Bride Wore Black (1940) was Woolrich's first novel of suspense. The leitmotif here, as elsewhere in Wool-rich, is the avenging angel. Julie Killeen's husband is killed on the church steps moments after their marriage, and in a ritual substitution of deathmaking for lovemak-ing she devotes the rest of her life to tracking down and systematically murdering the drunk driver and his four cronies whom she holds responsible for her loss. Wool-rich divides the book into five free-standing episodes, each built around a symbolic three-step dance. First a chapter showing Julie, each time in a new persona, preparing the trap for her current target; then the execution of her plan, each victim being ensnared in his own romantic image of the perfect woman; finally some pages dealing with Wanger, the homicide detective who is stalking the huntress through the years. At last, in part five, they meet, and Julie learns that like the men she killed, she too has been victimized by a perverse, malignant, and unknowable power; that a tangle of coinci-

INTRODUCTION Xlll

dence so grotesquely incredible that it must be the work of an evil god has ruined her precisely as she in turn ruined her prey for no reason whatsoever. When she understands this and says, "It's time for me to go," we know she means that it's time for her, too, to die.

In the judgment of many devotees including Lee Wright, the legendary mystery editor who bought the book for Simon & Schuster, and Anthony Boucher, dean of crime fiction critics The Bride Wore Black is the finest novel Woolrich ever wrote. Tm not certain I agree, for the style is unusually objective and unemotional for Woolrich and the book lacks the great heart-in-the-throat setpieces of later novels like Black Alibi and Phantom Lady. But what makes The Bride stand out in the Woolrich canon is the perfect balance of sympathy among its characters. No one has ever surpassed Woolrich at portraying how the death of a loved one affects the survivor and at making us empathize with the horrible things the survivor does after the loved one dies. Multiple murderess and psychotic though she is, we are forced to see the world as Julie sees it. Yet Woolrich had no peers when it came to making us empathize with people whose lives are torn apart by malign forces they can't comprehend, and so we must also stand in the shoes of each of Julie's targets. In the Wanger chapters we also get to understand how things look to the one who's hunting the hunter. And on finishing the novel we see the world and the dark powers above the world that crush us at their whim according to Woolrich.

Most of the first mystery novels of Woolrich's pulp colleagues and several of his own later novels were expansions of short fiction originally written for the pulp magazines. The Bride Wore Black is not. There are a few faint echoes from earlier tales; for example, the balcony murder in part one owes something to the scene in "I'm Dangerous Tonight" {All-American Fiction, November

1937; collected in The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Wool-rich, 1981), where Sarah Travis pushes her husband off the deck of the S.S. Gascony. But it's primarily the episodic nature of the novel (and not just of this novel) that reflects Woolrich's roots in shorter crime fiction.

Initial reviews of The Bride Wore Black were mixed. Will Cuppy, of the New York Herald-Tribune, complained of "an excess of ingenuity in the manner of telling and a pervading pulpiness of matter," and the New York Times Book Review's Isaac Anderson said that "the story takes a lot of believing, and does not make particularly good sense." Perhaps the most perceptive of the early comments was in the Saturday Review of Literature: "An opus out of the ordinary, highly emotional and suspenseful, with a surprise finish that turns somersaults in amazingly agile, if implausible, fashion. Odd." No one seemed to notice the functional nature of the wild coincidences revealed at the climax. But critical reservations had not the least effect on the novel's success, which continued throughout Woolrich's life and beyond.

It's the most frequently printed of all Woolrich's books: Hardcover publication by Simon & Schuster late in 1940; condensation in the Summer 1941 Detective Book Magazine; a Grosset & Dunlap hardcover reprint edition in 1942; the first paperback publication a few years later under the Pocket Books imprint in 1945 to name but a few.

Amazingly enough in view of its huge success in book form, it was never adapted into a Hollywood movie nor for television, and the only radio version was a half-hour play starring June Havoc and broadcast on NBC's Molle Mystery Theatre, February 7, 1947. Near the end of Woolrich's life, however, it was made into a film, in France, starring Jeanne Moreau and directed by Francois Truffaut, whose earlier classic Jules et Jim (1961) had also cast Moreau as an unknowable man-destroying