Hal Jeffries, "It Had to be Murder"
Most readers are likely more familiar with this character as simply “Jeff” rather than Hal; that is the name he is called by in Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation. He also changed the title to Rear Window. The basic outline of the movie version is all there in Woolrich’s original: Hal Jeffries spends his time peeping on neighbors through the rear window of his apartment as a result of the boredom of being strictly limited in his ability to move. Unlike in the movie, however, the cause of this infirmity is not revealed until the final lines of the story.
Buddy, “The Boy Cried Murder”
Buddy is 12-year-old boy prone to dealing with truth and facts in a particularly loose manner; as the title hints, he is a contemporary urban updating of the boy who cried wolf. On a sweltering night, Buddy seeks relief from the oppressive summer heat by sleeping on the fire escape of his apartment building and—much like Hal Jeffries—is convinced he has witnessed a murder. Due to his distant relationship with sticking to facts, however, everyone else is convinced his story is merely another exaggeration. This is another of Woolrich’s stories that was adapted into a successful film. In the transition, Buddy becomes Tommy Woodry.
Walter Lynch, “The Death of Me”
Walter Lynch is another in the seemingly endless line Woolrich characters who set out to take charge of their destiny only to be slapped harshly across the face by the whimsy of fate. Lynch attempts insurance fraud by faking his death which involves switching identities with a convenient accident victim. The convenience is short-lived, however, as it turns out the man whom everyone now thinks is him was a thief wanted by both an insurance investigator and the man’s criminal partners.
Veda, "Kiss of the Cobra"
“Kiss of the Cobra” is pretty much universally viewed as one of Woolrich’s weirdest tales if not the winner of the honor of the absolute weirdest. And why not? Here is part of the description of Veda:
“She's a slinky sort of person, no angles at all; and magnetic...dressed like a Westerner, but her eyes have a slant to them. They are the eyes of an Easterner. She doesn't walk like our women do, she seems to writhe all in one piece - undulates is the word…above her forehead, there's a sort of question-mark worked into it, in darker beads. You can't be sure what it is, but it's shaped like a question mark.”
Clint Burgess, “Leg Man”
The world of Woolrich is filled with people who know the truth but face a society that simply refuses to believe them. Clint Burgess differs from witnesses like Jeffries and Buddy or victims of circumstances like so many other characters in that he has purposely set out to dig for the truth when everything seems perfectly cut and dry. The title refers to job with a local newspaper and it is his reporter’s instinct that must face the wrath of conventional wisdom.
Ed Harlin, “The Corpse Next Door”
The quick-tempered and violent Harlin is one of Woolrich’s signature characters in those stories in which fear engenders crime to a level of absurdity more often associated with black humor. A simple and relatively innocuous event like stolen milk eventually drives Harlin past the point of relative sanity and into that state of mind occupied by such precursors as Poe’s narrator in the “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov.
