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Love and Night: Unknown Stories
by Cornell Woolrich, edited and with an introduction by Francis M. Nevins.
First edition, quarter-morocco state, 1/156 copies, signed and lettered
by the editor, slipcased, $250.; cloth state, 1/1,000 copies, copies signed
by the editor, currently available, $35. As always, add a flat $5. postage
for 1-3 books in a single package. It helps; it really does.
Most contemporary readers will only know Cornell Woolrich
and his work through 1) the large number of film noirs that were
made from his novels and short stories, including soul-brother-under-the-skin
Alfred Hitchcock's famous "Rear Window," or one of the versions
of "The Bride Wore Black" or "Phantom Lady" made over
the years. Most readers won't, however, be familiar with any one
of the three rare Woolrich-story-based films that editor of Love and
Night, Mike Nevins, has access to, and will screen, at the forthcoming
NoirCon in Philadelphia, April 4-7, 2008, which will include "The
Convicted," which happens to be Rita Hayworth's first movie appearance.
So, if you do happen to be a Woolrich fan already, you should try to come
to the NoirCon for that opportunity alone!; or 2) some of the paperback
reprints of his most famous novels that have popped up, on a pretty regular
basis, over the years since his death in 1968, from various New York publishers,
although, unfortunately for the would-be-interested reading public, the
major publishers usually reprint the same "tried and true" few
titles, but at least the contemporary reader can get some idea
from these reprints of just how good Woolrich was at creating that feeling
of suspense that usually starts with an almost subconscious, inchoate
sense of unease, arising out of what may seem at first to be a quite ordinary
situation—you just can't quite put your finger on what's "wrong,"
but soon enough you reach the "butterflies in your stomach"
state, which may then transmogrify, if you give yourself over to it, in
the hands of a master like Woolrich, to something electrically crawling
up your spine and into your brain, where it starts nefariously sizzling
away at the semblance of sanity you've worked so hard all these years
to present to the world, so "others" won't think you "strange"
or "weird," god forbid, and perhaps shun your company because
a small fragment of the enormity of "ordinary" existence, doing
a 9 to 5, may rub-off on them . . . and we wouldn't want that,
now, would we? They might actually have to think about what-in-the-hell
they're/we're all doing here, and start to feel, as Woolrich said
he himself felt, "like an insect that's been put inside an overturned
glass jar; and it tries to climb up the sides to get out, and it can't,
and it can't, and it can't. . . ." A wonderful writer, my friends,
truly.
But the majority of the stories in Love and Night
are not of the type described above: they were mostly written when Cornell
Woolrich was still a "young man" (in his early to late 20s)—a
closeted gay inhabiting the world of flappers, speak-easies, and the Charleston
national dance craze. His first novel, Cover Charge, which, by
the way, has the coolest art deco dustjacket that I've ever seen
on a book (and I wish I had a copy in my own collection!), was written
and published by the very well-respected publishing firm of Albert &
Charles Boni in 1926 while he was only a junior at Columbia University,
and was touted, by some critics at the time anyway, as heralding
the advent of "the next F. Scott Fitzgerald:" a not-unhappy
state for most young writers to find themselves in, but one wonders, in
hindsight, whether Woolrich actually got all that much of a charge out
of the designation. His next novel, Children of the Ritz, however,
won a $10,000 prize from, and a four-issue serialization in, College
Humor magazine, one of the leading publications of the 1920s featuring
"light fiction" (whatever that might be, in today's terms!),
mainly in the form of boy-meets-girl-and-humorous-chaos-ensues-type short
stories, cartoons, jokes not of too risqué a variety, etc., and
Woolrich was off and running as a "real" writer. At least for
a while. Until the Depression killed almost everything, that is.
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