"It Had to be Murder"
The protagonist witnesses a murder while peering through his rear window with a voyeuristic enjoyment of peeping into the private lives of his neighbors. Thanks to knowledge, the murderer is apprehended; a result very unlikely had he not been in the right place at the right time. The only the reason he was not just able, but forced by circumstances to be there at that time engaging in his little voyeuristic pastime is because his broken leg in a cast prevents him from doing much else. And so, ironically, his unfortunate circumstances of health becomes the only thing standing in the way of the commitment of the perfect crime.
“The Boy Cried Murder”
For this tale of another witness to murder, Woolrich turns to the ironic fable of the boy who cried wolf. Like that young shepherd, when young Buddy finally is actually telling a truth with his highly dubious story of a neighbor committing murder, he is not believed precisely because he has demonstrated a propensity for not telling the truth with his highly dubious exaggerations in the past.
"Three O'Clock"
The typical Woolrich conclusion typically turns on at least one ironic element. This highly suspenseful story is layered with one irony on top of another. A man builds a time bomb in order to kill his wise and her suspected lover at their next assignation. But while putting the bomb in place in the basement, he is surprised by burglars who gag him and leave him tied up to watch the clock timer ticking away the last few precious minutes of his life. And that’s just where the ironies start. By the end, he’s realized that that the suspected lover is really his wife’s troubled brother and that the bomb isn’t going to work anyway. But by that point, it’s already too late as the anxiety of watching the clock tick away to his doom as driven him mad.
“The Death of Me”
“It Had to be Murder” was adapted by Hitchcock in his film Rear Window. One can only wonder why Hitch didn’t consider filming this story as well as it is really a greater example of Hitchcockian suspense. Like many of Hitchcock’s films, the plot turns on the irony of a man who is believed to be either literally or figuratively someone other than who he really is. In an effort to defraud his insurance company by faking his death, he makes the ultimate mistake of trading identities with a dead man in an even worse state than his own and soon finds himself on the run from thugs as well as an dedicated insurance investigator.
Pervasive Irony...at the Time, Anyway
The most pervasive irony throughout the Woolrich canon has consistently become less ironic with the passage of time. At the time of composition, however, trust in law enforcement and the assumption that the job of the police was the pursuit of justice still prevailed among a massive majority of Americans. That the cops who populate the stories of Woolrich are almost universally agents of obstruction to his many innocent people trying to avoid the consequences of guilt as well as those outside the law pursuing the truth because the system won’t.
