Nightwebs

My discounted, soft cover, CrimeMasterWorks edition, Nightwebs, sat patiently on a bookshelf. These reprinted pulp fiction mysteries waited their turn while my attention was directed at better literature. Upon finally opening this collection I was quite surprised to find one exceptional story after another, varied in style and content, but uniformly fascinating. Nightwebs may well be the single best collection of short stories by Cornell Woolrich. The credit goes not only to Cornell Woolrich, but to the editor, Francis M. Nevins, Jr., responsible for compiling this collection. His lengthy introduction revealed a deep familiarity with Woolrich's works. Only later did I learn that Nevins had authored a highly regarded biography titled Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die. Nightwebs is divided into three sections and contains twelve short stories: The Claws of Night - Graves for the Living, The Red Tide, The Corpse Next Door, and You'll Never See Me Again; Death and the City - Dusk to Dawn, Murder at the Automat, Death in the Air, and Mamie 'n' Me; The Butchers and the Trapped - The Screaming Laugh, One and Half Murders, Dead on her Feet, and One Night in Barcelona. Nevins provides a short afterword (rather than introduction) to each of these stories. A few phrases will clearly indicate the wide range in style and structure of these exceptional tales: horror of being buried alive; taunt and nerve jingling; a rich evocation of that seedy automat and its habitues; fast action, whizbang, very simply plotted; its frisson of horror at the denouement; and grimly Woolrichian image of justice. Cornell Woolrich left Columbia University before completing his degree, largely due to an early success; his second novel, Children of the Ritz (1927), won a prize of $10,000. He was invited to Hollywood by First National Pictures to help rewrite the novel as a screenplay. This success was short lived as the Depression rapidly undermined the publishing market, and Woolrich was forced to turn to pulp fiction for mystery magazines like Dime Mystery , Detective Fiction Weekly, Street & Smith Detective Mystery Magazine, Black Mask, and others. Much of his later life he lived in reclusion, loneliness, poor health, and despair. At his death in 1968, he left $850,000 to Columbia University as an endowment for creative writing.