"It Had to Be Murder" and Other Stories Cornell Woolrich

Cornell George Hopley Woolrich (/ˈwʊlrɪtʃ/ WUUL-ritch; December 4, 1903 – September 25, 1968) was an American novelist and short story writer. He sometimes used the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley.

His biographer, Francis Nevins Jr., rated Woolrich the fourth best crime writer of his day, behind Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler.

Woolrich was born in New York City. His parents separated when he was young, and he lived for a time in Mexico with his father before returning to New York to live with his mother, Claire Attalie Woolrich.[1]

He attended Columbia University but left in 1926 without graduating when his first novel, Cover Charge, was published.[2][3] As Eddie Duggan observes, "Woolrich enrolled at New York's Columbia University in 1921 where he spent a relatively undistinguished year until he was taken ill and was laid up for some weeks. It was during this illness (a Rear Window–like confinement involving a gangrenous foot, according to one version of the story) that Woolrich started writing, producing Cover Charge, which was published in 1926."[4] Cover Charge was one of his Jazz Age novels inspired by the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. A second short story, "Children of the Ritz", won Woolrich the first prize of $10,000 the following year in a competition organised by College Humor and First National Pictures; this led to his working as a screenwriter in Hollywood for First National Pictures. While in Hollywood, Woolrich explored his sexuality,[5] apparently engaging in what Francis M. Nevins Jr. describes as "promiscuous and clandestine homosexual activity" and by marrying Violet Virginia Blackton, the 21-year-old daughter of J. Stuart Blackton, one of the founders of the Vitagraph studio. Failing in both his attempt at marriage and at establishing a career as a screenwriter (the unconsummated marriage was annulled in 1933; Woolrich garnered no screen credits), Woolrich sought to resume his life as a novelist:

Although Woolrich had published six 'jazz-age' novels, concerned with the party-antics and romances of the beautiful young things on the fringes of American society, between 1926 and 1932, he was unable to establish himself as a serious writer. Perhaps because the 'jazz-age' novel was dead in the water by the 1930s when the Depression had begun to take hold, Woolrich was unable to find a publisher for his seventh novel, I Love You, Paris, so he literally threw away the typescript, dumped it in a dustbin, and re-invented himself as a pulp writer.[4]

When he turned to pulp and detective fiction, Woolrich's output was so prolific his work was often published under one of his many pseudonyms.[4] For example, "William Irish" was the byline in Dime Detective Magazine (February 1942) on his 1942 story "It Had to Be Murder", source of the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie Rear Window and itself based on H.G. Wells' short story "Through a Window". François Truffaut filmed Woolrich's The Bride Wore Black and Waltz into Darkness in 1968 and 1969, respectively, the latter as Mississippi Mermaid. Ownership of the copyright in Woolrich's original story "It Had to Be Murder" and its use for Rear Window was litigated before the US Supreme Court in Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990).

He returned to New York, where he and his mother moved into the Hotel Marseilles (Broadway and West 103rd Street on Manhattan's Upper West Side). Eddie Duggan observes that "[a]lthough his writing made him wealthy, Woolrich and his mother lived in a series of seedy hotel rooms, including the squalid Hotel Marseilles apartment building in Harlem [sic], among a group of thieves, prostitutes and lowlifes that would not be out of place in Woolrich's dark fictional world."[4] Woolrich lived there until his mother's death on October 6, 1957, which prompted his move to the slightly more upscale Hotel Franconia (20 West 72nd Street near Central Park).[6] Duggan wrote:

[After] Woolrich's mother died in 1957, he [went] into a sharp physical and mental decline.

In later years, he socialized on occasion in Manhattan bars with Mystery Writers of America colleagues and younger fans such as writer Ron Goulart.[7] He moved later to the Sheraton-Russell on Park Avenue and became a virtual recluse. In his 60s, with his eyesight failing, lonely, wracked by guilt over his homosexuality, tortured by self-doubt, alcoholic and a diabetic, Woolrich neglected himself to such a degree that he allowed a foot infection to become gangrenous which resulted, early in 1968, in the amputation of a leg.

After the amputation and a conversion to Catholicism, Woolrich returned to the Sheraton-Russell, requiring the use of a wheelchair. Some of the staff there would take Woolrich down to the lobby so he could look out on the passing traffic.

Woolrich did not attend the premiere of Truffaut's film of his novel The Bride Wore Black in 1968, even though it was held in New York City. He died September 25, 1968.

Woolrich bequeathed his estate of about $850,000 to Columbia University to endow scholarships in his mother's memory for writing students.[3] His papers are also kept at the Columbia University Libraries.[8]

Most of Woolrich's books are out of print, and new editions were slow to come out because of estate issues. However, new collections of his short stories were issued in the early 1990s. As of February 3, 2020, the Faded Page has seven titles available as ebooks in the public domain in Canada; these may be still under copyright elsewhere. In 2020 and 2021, Otto Penzler's "American Mystery Classics" series released new editions of Waltz into Darkness and The Bride Wore Black in both hardcover and paperback.

Woolrich died leaving fragments of an unfinished novel, titled The Loser; fragments have been published separately and also collected in Tonight, Somewhere in New York (2005).

Novels

Short fiction collections

• Manhattan Love Song (1934) (based on the novel), directed by Leonard Fields
• Convicted (1938) (based on the short story "Face Work"), directed by Leon Barsha
• Street of Chance (1942) (based on the novel The Black Curtain), directed by Jack Hively
• The Leopard Man (1943) (novel Black Alibi), directed by Jacques Tourneur
• Phantom Lady (1944) (based on the novel), directed by Robert Siodmak
• The Mark of the Whistler (1944) (based on the story "Dormant Account"), directed by William Castle
• Deadline at Dawn (1946) (based on the novel), the only film directed by stage director Harold Clurman
• Black Angel (1946) (based on the novel), directed by Roy William Neill
• The Chase (1946) (based on the novel The Black Path of Fear). directed by Arthur Ripley
• Fall Guy (1947) (based on the story "Cocaine"), directed by Reginald Le Borg
• The Guilty (1947) (based on the story "He Looked Like Murder"), directed by John Reinhardt
• Fear in the Night (1947) (based on the story "Nightmare"), directed by Maxwell Shane
• The Return of the Whistler (1948) (based on the story "All at Once, No Alice"), directed by D. Ross Lederman
• I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes (1948) (based on the story), directed by William Nigh
• Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948) (based on the novel), directed by John Farrow
• The Window (1949) (based on the story "The Boy Cried Murder"), directed by Ted Tetzlaff
• No Man of Her Own (1950) (based on the novel I Married a Dead Man), directed by Mitchell Leisen
• The Earring (1951) (based on the story "The Death Stone"), directed by León Klimovsky
• The Trace of Some Lips (1952)[9] (based on the story "Collared"), directed by Juan Bustillo Oro
• If I Should Die Before I Wake (1952),[10] directed by Carlos Hugo Christensen
• Don't Ever Open That Door (1952) (an anthology film based on the stories "Somebody on the Phone" and "Humming Bird Comes Home") directed by Carlos Hugo Christensen
• Rear Window (1954) (based on the story "It Had to Be Murder"), directed by Alfred Hitchcock
• Obsession (1954) (based on the story "Silent as the Grave"), directed by Jean Delannoy
• The Glass Eye (1956), directed by Antonio Santillán
• Nightmare (1956) (based on the story), directed by Maxwell Shane
• Escapade (1957) (based on the story "Cinderella and the Mob"), directed by Ralph Habib
• Ah, Bomb! (1964) (based on the story Adventures of a Fountain Pen), directed by Kihachi Okamoto
• The Boy Cried Murder (1966) (based on the story The Boy Cried Murder), directed by George P. Breakston
• The Bride Wore Black (1968) (based on the novel), directed by François Truffaut
• Mississippi Mermaid (1969) (based on the novel Waltz into Darkness), directed by François Truffaut
• Kati Patang (1970) (based on the novel I Married a Dead Man),[11] directed by Shakti Samanta
• Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972) (based on the novel Rendezvous in Black), directed by Umberto Lenzi
• You'll Never See Me Again (1973), TV Movie directed by Jeannot Szwarc
• Martha (1974) (based on the story For the Rest of Her Life), directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
• Gun Moll (1975) (based on the story "Collared"), directed by Giorgio Capitani
• Union City (1980) (based on the story "The Corpse Next Door"), directed by Marcus Reichert
• I Married a Shadow (1983) (based on the novel I Married a Dead Man)
• Cloak & Dagger (1984) (story "The Boy Who Cried Murder"), directed by Richard Franklin
• I'm Dangerous Tonight (1990) (based on the story "I'm Dangerous Tonight"), directed by Tobe Hooper
• Mrs. Winterbourne (1996) (based on the novel "I Married a Dead Man"), directed by Richard Benjamin
• Rear Window (1998) (based on the story "It Had to Be Murder"), directed by Jeff Bleckner
• Original Sin (2001) (based on the novel Waltz into Darkness), directed by Michael Cristofer
• Four O'Clock (2006) (based on the story "Three O'Clock")

1. ^ Corliss, Richard (8 December 2003). "That Old Feeling: Woolrich's World". Time. Archived from the original on 11 August 2010. Retrieved 25 July 2010.
2. ^ "Take Five with Charles Ardai '91". Columbia College Today. 2020-05-07. Retrieved 2022-05-01.
3. ^ a b Columbia College (Columbia University). Office of Alumni Affairs and Development; Columbia College (Columbia University) (1981). Columbia College today. Columbia University Libraries. New York: Columbia College, Office of Alumni Affairs and Development.
4. ^ a b c d Eddie Duggan (1999) 'Writing in the darkness: the world of Cornell Woolrich' CrimeTime 2.6 pp. 113–126.
5. ^ Krinsky, Charles (2003). "Woolrich, Cornell". glbtq.com. Archived from the original on 2007-08-14. Retrieved 2007-08-20.
6. ^ Nevins, Francis M. "Introduction," Tonight, Somewhere in New York. Carroll & Graf, 2001.
7. ^ Goulart, Ron: "The Ghost of Cornell Woolrich" The Twilight Zone Magazine, December 1984, pp. 16–17
8. ^ "Cornell Woolrich papers, 1958-1964". www.columbia.edu. Retrieved 2022-05-01.
9. ^ Ortiz, Roberto Carlos (2 August 2018). "The melodrama star as a noir film heroine: The Trace of Some Lips (1952)". Balajú. Revista de Cultura y Comunicación de la Universidad Veracruzana (8): 69–89. doi:10.25009/blj.v0i8.2552. S2CID 192712997.
10. ^ Thompson, Currie K (May 2008). "Two Takes on Gender in Argentine Film Noir". Studies in Hispanic Cinemas. 4 (2): 121–130. doi:10.1386/shci.4.2.121_1.
11. ^ "Shabnam Still Gets Fan Mail". Indian Express. Dec 4, 2010. Retrieved May 7, 2013.

• Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "Black Window: Cornell Woolrich." Film Comment Vol. 20 No. 5 (Sept–Oct 1984), 36–38.
• Nevins, Francis M. Jr. (1988), First You Dream, Then You Die, Mysterious Press.
• Duggan, Eddie. Writing in the Darkness: The World of Cornell Woolrich CrimeTime (2.6.1999) 113–126.
• Phelps, Donald. "Cinema Gris: Woolrich/Neil's Black Angel." Film Comment Vol. 36 No. 1 (Jan–Feb 2000), 64–69.
• Breen, Jon L. "Dark Deeds: The Mystery of Cornell Woolrich." The Weekly Standard (March 8, 2004), 31–33.
• Lane, Joel. "Mansions of Fear: The Dark Houses of Cornell Woolrich". Wormwood No 3 (Autumn 2004), 22–32.
• Photinos, Christine. Cornell Woolrich and the Tough-Man Tradition of American Crime Fiction. Clues: A Journal of Detection (Fall 2010), 61-68.

• Cornell Woolrich at IMDb
• Cornell Woolrich tribute site (archived)
• Cornell Woolrich radio adaptations on Suspense
• Works by Cornell Woolrich at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by Cornell Woolrich at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Cornell Woolrich Papers at Columbia University's Rare Book & Manuscript Library