The Bride Wore Black, by Cornell Woolrich
Book cover: The Bride Wore Black, by Cornell Woolrich
From The Bride Wore Black:
“…If she comes forward within a day or two to identify or clear herself, as soon as she hears we’re looking for her, the chances are it’ll turn out to have been an accident and she ran out simply to escape the noteriety, knowing she had no right up here. If she remains hidden and we have to go out hunting for her, I think we can say murder and not be very far from right.”
He pocketed the description and other data he’d taken down. “We’ll get her, either way, don’t worry.”
But they didn’t.
Hoo boy, I do love stories about Lady Murderers—ladies who DO THE MURDERING, I mean, not ladies who GET MURDERED—and while we have plenty of stories like that NOW, I haven’t come across a ton of them that were originally published in the 1940s?
So.
A rich guy falls off a balcony.
A poor guy is poisoned.
A few more men die in a few more ways—despite how old this book is, I don’t want to spoil too much—and the only thing the deaths really have in common is that there was an as-yet-unidentified woman in attendance at each one. The woman’s description is very different each time—so different that most of the police force thinks that the cases must be entirely unrelated—but there’s one guy who just HAS A FEELING that there’s a connection…
Ahhhhh, this one is so great! So great!
So great that I want to read the rest of Cornell Woolrich’s books, like, NOW.
The set pieces—the cat-and-mouse lead up to each death—are AMAZING. They’re all so different and they’re smart and they’re psychologically astute. Some of the psychology and social dynamics feel so fresh and real and accurate, even, that they’d still work in a version of this set in the modern day.
Some of the descriptions and dialogue come off wonderfully noir-er than noir:
He turned away. “Cut that stuff out.”
“And at least you’re like you should be,” she went on, undeterred. “I mean so many of these people that write red-blooded outdoor stuff are skinny anemic little runts wrapped in blankets. You at least cut a figure that a girl can get her teeth into.”
“You oughta be poured over waffles,” he let her known disgustedly.
Sometimes it’s mean, sometimes it’s empathetic, sometimes it’s genuinely weird, and sometimes it’s truly just funny, like this bit that begins and ends a scene:
Sonya chugged past at random, trailing clouds of cigarette smoke after her like a straining locomotive on an upgrade.
…
She went chugging off again billowing plumes of smoke. You almost expected to hear a train whistle blow.
Not only am I going to make it a personal mission to read the rest of Woolrich’s books, I’m ALSO going to work on reading everything in this imprint specifically. Because, LOOK! I mean, criminy, even if I hadn’t adored this book so very very much, I’d want to start collecting them for the cover art alone.
As of the moment that I’m writing this, the paperback is somehow on sale for $6.50 at Amazon?
Which is totallyyyy worth it, in my opinion.
But obviously, there’s also the library.
Oh! Also! There’s a 1968 Truffaut movie based on it, and you’d better BELIEVE that I’ll be tracking it down (spoilers in the trailer, though it looks like there are also some significant changes):
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A note on Reading Old Books: Given that it was originally published in 1940, there are some attitudes and language in here that we thankfully don’t see (as much) in 2021. Different times, yes; gross then and still gross now, also yes.