“There's an innocuous explanation for everything. Everything is a coin that has two sides to it, and one side is innocuous but the other can be ominous.”
The first-person narrator of this story is responsible for this observation, but this is a clear case of a character voicing opinions held by his creator. Woolrich’s greatest stories as well as some of his lesser ones—to which, unfortunately, it is generally agreed that “New York Blues” is a representative—can all be fairly said to one degree or another to be a pursuit of this fundamental driving philosophy. His stories are often explicitly about a person suspected of a crime or wrongdoing who must either prove his innocence or depend upon a loved one to prove for him. The two sides of the coin representing what may be innocuous, but looks ominous—or, rarely, vice versa—is one that can is flipped in any number of stories by Woolrich, no matter the genre or the time of composition.
“Guess we can take that cast off your leg now. You must be tired of sitting there all day doing nothing.”
Spoiler alert: these are the last lines of this particular story and it is really only notable on account of how the subject of the protagonist’s broken leg is handled in the film adapted from the story. That film was Rear Window, the director was Alfred Hitchcock and the actor playing the man whose lack of mobility led to a brief avocation as a Peeping Tom was Jimmy Stewart. The narrator and character portrayed by Stewart informs the reader from the beginning that he has become given to looking out his window at his neighbors on account of his mobility being “strictly limited just around this time” but he fails to give details and so the offhand remark by the doctor comes as something of a revelation that fittingly brings the story to a close with all questions answered. Among the many changes Hitchcock made in turning the story into a film was reversing this decision and letting the audience know the full details of what has made Stewart’s character essentially wheelchair-bound. It is textbook example of how something that works perfectly in a work of literature would be cinematically inappropriate.
“Every life is a mystery. And every story of every life is a mystery. But it is not what happens that is the mystery. It is whether it has to happen no matter what, whether it is ordered and ordained, fixed and fated, or whether it can be missed, avoided, circumvented, passed by; that is the mystery.”
This was the final story that Woolrich published during his lifetime and this quote seems to suggest a summing up of the power of storytelling. Many of the lives that he wrote about were quite literally mysteries that needed solving, but even when working outside the crime genre, Woolrich was writing about the mysteries of the human heart and mind. The assertion that what happens is not the mystery may also speak to a long career writing crime fiction that at times seemed to studiously avoid the specific sub-genre of the whodunit. Unlike most other literary stars of his era who trafficked in the seedier side of the criminal world, Woolrich did not give the world a master detective. Instead, he preferred to allow—indeed, to force—regular people to figure things out for themselves.
“A slight concussion of the brain simplifies matters so beautifully.”
The attribution of this quote is to the third-person narrator, but the thought is entirely centered within the mind of the story’s lead character, one Mr. Stapp, who is at the time fiendishly plotting to kill his wife and her suspected lover with a bomb set to go off at 3:00 PM. In addition to be a typical example of Woolrich’s ability to craft a fascinating sentence on its own, this unvoiced thought of Mr. Stapp’s is also an excellent example of the corrosively bitter irony that often attends the criminal activities taking place in his world of literary noir. Mr. Stapp is one of Woolrich’s more completely satisfied would-be killers, as satisfied with his own philosophical musing as he is that his wife has no one to blame but herself for what is destined to occur at 3:00. Unfortunately, Mr. Stapp is also one of Woolrich’s trademarks “saps” for whom fate desperately desires a different outcome. An unexpected burglary beyond his control and a technical failure that is nobody’s fault but his own conspire against him and yet ironically allows his assertion to prove quite true.
