Gutbrain Records

Saturday, 05 April 2008

I often buy books just for their covers but here's one I bought for the cover and the contents.

This is a collection of stories by Cornell Woolrich, who often wrote as William Irish. This collection was published in 1954 but the stories are all © 1934–1940 and no doubt taken from pulp fiction magazines.

Some pulp fiction is great but most of it is actually pretty bad, poorly written and just plain boring. Woolrich wrote some of the best and some of the average, but never any of the worst.

The first paragraph of the first story, "Johnny On The Spot", displays Woolrich's command of the craft, how to grab and hold the reader's attention.

The clock on the wall of the cafeteria said quarter to four in the morning when he came in from the street. He wasn't even twenty-eight yet, Johnny Donovan. Any doctor in town would have given him fifty more years. Only he himself knew better than that. He didn't even have fifty days left; maybe only fifty hours, or maybe fifty minutes, depending on how good he was.

This turns out to be an unusually violent story, as well as something of a proto-feminist story. It turns out not to matter how good Johnny is; it's up to Johnny's wife to save him from a slow and painful death.

The second story, "Deadly Night Call", originally published as "Somebody On The Phone", is short and effective. Constant phone calls from a blackmailer drive a woman to suicide. Her brother swears to avenge her death, thus leading to a twist ending which we have seen a few times since this story was published. (I'd be curious to know if the same twist ending had been used before. I imagine it probaby had, but somebody was the first to write it.) The writing in this story is especially good and especially economical.

The third story, "Momentum", describes a descent into hell, something of a Woolrich specialty. A desperate man kills by accident and then nightmarishly can't stop killing people, usually people who aren't the people he thinks they are, never for any reason better than fear, paranoia and a gradually consuming insanity.

"Boy With Body", originally published as "The Corpse And The Kid", is about a teenage boy who tries to cover up a murder committed by his father. Most of the action concerns the various complications involved in moving the corpse and framing somebody else for the crime. This is one of the less interesting stories here, but it's short and entertaining.

Less successful is "Death Sits In The Dentist's Chair", a standard mystery story with a solution that most readers should see coming from a mile away. A man dies of arsenic poisoning while a dentist is working on his teeth. The police are convinced the dentist killed him; the dentist's friend works to prove otherwise.

The last story in the book is the longest and the best. "The Room With Something Wrong", originally published under the much blander title "Mystery In Room 913", is about a hotel detective trying to find out why various people — all definitely not suicidal — staying in room 913 of the St. Anselm hotel kill themselves by jumping out the window. Woolrich creates an atmosphere of great suspense and dread in this classic locked room mystery, believably works in the possiblity of supernatural agency and subverts some of the racist and sexist expectations typical of many pulp readers.