From "New York Blues"
Cornell Woolrich excelled in the world of pulp fiction. Quickly written stories published not long afterward often in magazines featuring lurid covers. He primary milieu was the world of ordinary people finding themselves suddenly trapped in web of criminal suspicion. This would not normally be a place where one finds downright poetic imagery, but Woolrich was no ordinary pulp author. An excellent example of his style and mastery of conveying elements of his story through descriptive prose can be found in the way he uses imagery in a nearly plotless story written late in his career to make the rhythms of urban existence come palpably alive:
“evening's at its noon…the outgoing tide has simmered down, and there's a lull-like the calm in the eye of a hurricane…The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers…Everybody has got where they wanted to go and that was out somewhere…Now everybody will want to get back…the incoming tide rolls in…as Johnny Carson's face hits millions of screens...the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore…then dies down, and a deep still sets in…from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as it's ever going to get.”
Imagery Through Repetition
The lyrical description of an ordinary day in New York is starkly contrasted with imagery that conveys the maddening repetition of being a patient in a hospital. Woolrich gets everything right in one short, economical paragraph that trades the poetic expression of city life above for the power of reiteration in this example:
“long nights, that were also days…long blanks, that were also nights. Needles, and angled glass rods to suck water through. Needles, and curious enamel wedges slid under your middle. Needles, and - needles and needles and needles. Like swarms of persistent mosquitoes with unbreakable drills…Or the target of a porcupine…”
Master of the Epigram
Though excelling in very different genres featuring characters unlikely to ever cross paths in real life, Woolrich’s powerful control of the epigram as imagery almost rivals the master of the form himself, Oscar Wilde. Throughout his stories can be found pithy little sentences capable of saying more than lesser writers get out of an entire paragraph:
“The sightseers would have been disappointed, as the real thing always makes a poorer show than the fake.”
“She was the kind of shopkeeper who finishes the paragraph she is reading before waiting on the customer.”
“As for her perfume, it was the kind you only noticed after she'd left a room, not while she was still in it.”
Why ask a Question if You Know the Answer?
While he is very, very good with an epigram, the definitive use of imagery to be found in a Woolrich story is almost certainly the judicious use of a question as rhetorical stimulus for imagery. Oddly, these are not exclusively rhetorical questions that require or expect no answer; in fact, they are only raised to be answered:
“But what good is a lull? It's only a breathing spell in which to get more frightened.”
“Home? What is home? Home is where a house is that you come back to when the rainy season is about to begin, to wait until the next dry season comes around.”
“What is an attachment? It is the most difficult of all the human interrelationships to explain, because it is the vaguest, the most impalpable.”
