Last month--incidentally Pride Month--crime fiction author and leading critic Martin Edwards found space on his blog to give two sentences of about 100 words over to a consideration of my essay collection Nothing Darker Than the Night, which was published nearly a year ago in 2025.
Here's the full notice at Martin's blog:
I'd also like to squeeze in a mention of another worthwhile Stark House Press title, Nothing Darker Than the Night, which focuses on hardboiled and noir fiction and collects essays by Curtis Evans that have appeared elsewhere in the past. Many of the authors featured, such as Hammett, Chandler and Woolrich, have been discussed extensively by leading critics, and the absence of an index is a shame, but it's good to see pieces about such writers as Fredric Brown, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, and Edna Sherry, all of whose novels novels I find very interesting, and all of whom deserve to be remembered.
It's good to see a book of mine get a review notice, however brief, that deems the book "worthwhile" and I agree with Martin of course that writers like Brown, Holding and Sherry deserve to be remembered (it's why I wrote about them), but I was a little puzzled by the position that Martin seems to have adopted, at least in my case, that writers who "have been extensively discussed extensively by leading critics" need not be discussed anymore by subsequent critics, leading or otherwise (or, some might dare say, scholars).
Certainly this is a position that Martin has never adopted in his own work, which contains a great deal of entertaining and informative opining from him on famous, much previously discussed writers, like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, for example. To his credit, Martin, with whom I have discussed these matters for some 25 years now (though very little in the last decade), never automatically deferred to leading critics, even ones whose writing he grew up with and he patently admired, like Julian Symons.
In my case I brought both original thought and research to my work on such writers as Hammett, Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Highsmith and Woolrich; and, reading Martin's notice, I had to wonder whether he had actually yet read any of these essays on them. If he does, I think it's possible he might find some of them interesting. I'll list a few of the things I do with them here.
I look into the life of the woman, Elise De Viane, who brought and won an assault case against Dashiell Hammett. Poor Elise's claims have tended to get swept under the rug by "leading critics." I gave a portrait, for the first time, of this shunned woman.
I analyze Dashiell Hammett's Op Tales as true detective fiction, definitely not an interest of "leading critics."
I look at the this history of American violence that informed Hammett's fiction, specifically Red Harvest, citing many specific cases.
With Chandler, I take a revisionist stance of his criticism of English detective fiction. This essay has received a lot of favorable commentary over the years and certainly challenges the received wisdom of his "leading critics." I provide very in-depth analysis of Chandler's literary feud with Ross Macdonald and his illuminating correspondence with minor mystery writer James M. Fox. Again, these were pieces that received much favorable attention when published in their original form at the website Crimereads. Of my Chandler-Macdonald piece, Macdonald's biographer, Tom Nolan, a fine man with whom I have dealt and surely one of those leading critics to whom Martin refers, left a comment thanking me for my "fine article."
I could go on--I won't say anything about how I think the pieces are well-written and entertaining, how immodest that would be of me--but I want to get to what I think is the nub of the matter here, which I suspect is my revisionist take on Cornell Woolrich and criticism of Francis Nevins' 1988 Woolrich biography, First You Dream, Then You Die, now nearly forty years old.
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| Cornell Woolrich at age 21 in 1925 He went though a lot of mental anguish before he launched his crime writing career nearly a decade later. |
Concerning Woolrich and Nevins, who have been linked in people's minds for decades, and himself Martin in 2021 nostalgically recalled:
I discovered Cornell Woolrich in the 1980s when many of his books were published in paperback with insightful introductions by Francis M. Nevins. I became a real fan and when Mike Nevins published Woolrich's biography I also devoured that. Two years ago, at [the] Bouchercon I had the pleasure of meeting Mike Nevins at long last and took the chance to thank him for helping to enthuse me about Woolrich.
So Nevins is all bound up in Martin's nostalgia about a younger Martin, pushing thirty and discovering noir crime fiction. It's kind of like me and John Dickson Carr and his biographer, my friend Doug Greene, in the 1990s.
To be sure, I'm younger than Martin but I remember those Woolrich books too, specifically those editions--to be honest the evocative cover illustrations have lingered with me more favorably than the introductions--but I certainly can't say I hungrily "devoured" Nevins' biography of Woolrich, which, whatever its merits, is one of the most indigestible doorstop books I have ever read. (Confession: My own essay collection is 424 pages and has 48 essays, reviews and articles, in case you wondered, so I can understand why a reviewer might find it daunting.)
I wrote about the above, among many other matters, in my 2022 Woolrich essay at Crimereads, which appears, in even more expanded form, in my book:
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| One of those old Eighties Ballantine editions |
Ironically there is comparatively little personal detail about Cornell Woolrich [in the biography], especially given the mammoth size of the book (613 pages of smallish type, including a microscopically printed index). Most of Dream...is given over to minute detail on almost every piece of fiction Woolrich ever wrote, as well as the numerous film, radio and television adaptations that have been made from his work, with the result that what information is provided on Woolrich's life is dully buried in the dead weight of bibliographical data and plot summaries. Much of Nevins' influence on the general public's perception of Cornell Woolrich probably can be traced more directly to the introductions he contributed, beginning in 1971, three years after the authors death, to myriad Woolrich short fiction anthologies and novel reprints (particularly publisher Ballantine's lauded early Eighties paperback reissues, the moody cover art for which, rendered by Larry Schwinger, recalls the haunting isolation of painter Edward Hopper's urban art, especially his 1942 painting Nighthawks).
Crucially and to his credit Nevins was able to provide us with interviews with contemporaries of Woolrich, but primary research in newspapers, census records and other data was sorely lacking. Disappointingly, there is also little surviving personal correspondence from Woolrich. Perhaps somewhat uncharitably the late sci-fi writer Barry N. Malzberg, who met and admired Woolrich, backhandedly referred to Nevins' book as "bibliographically useful." To me Barry referred to Nevins' book as a bibliography, not a biography.
What Nevins did accomplish, when it came to getting into the life and psyche of Woolrich, is establish what on my blog in 2014 I called the "black legend" of Woolrich as a miserable, rotten, self-hating, mother-obsessed, closet queer. Malzberg bluntly termed this treatment Nevins' "incessant fag-baiting," asserting that Woolrich's biographer regarded and treated homosexuality as a "pathological condition."
It's not an exaggeration to say that although Nevins loves much of Woolrich's work (while also ridiculing a fair chunk of it), he loathes the man himself and seemingly derives enjoyment from mocking him. I find it a strange attitude in a biographer. I'm rather reminded of the old Charles Atlas comic book ads of the beach bully kicking sand at the 98-pound weakling. And a dead one at that, who can not even attempt to defend himself.
As I looked at the "evidence" which Nevins provided for his thesis I was unpersuaded. Indeed I became appalled that "leading critics" for decades had been proclaiming what I deemed an essentially rather speculative homophobic line of argument as factual. I methodically tested Nevins' narrative and provided my own researched counter take in my essay. I also established, I think, that Nevins' literary analysis of Woolrich's alleged self-hating homosexuality was astoundingly puerile. Surely this wasn't what impressed Martin when he "devoured" the book nearly four decades ago.
My piece became one of Crimereads' most read and discussed essays and to date has generated over forty comments, only one of which, mere invective, was critical of me. Today on Google's search engine it is the fifth hit for the term "Cornell Woolrich," after Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon and Goodreads. It frankly astonished me that Martin could implicitly dismiss this essay as unneeded because a "leading critic" had already written extensively about Woolrich. It's precisely because of that critic that my own piece needed to be written. Maybe Martin hasn't read the essay, but many other people have, including individuals who are at least as notable critics as Nevins.
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| About Cornell Woolrich's disastrous marriage there is a difference of opinion. |
But then it wouldn't be the first time that an older straight boomer has felt comfortable peddling as fact Nevins' really remarkably homophobic views of Woolrich's alleged homosexuality. This aspect of it seemingly went by so unnoticed in 1989, the height of the AIDS era, that Nevins' book, published by Otto Penzler's Mysterious Press, was awarded an Edgar, evidently without qualm or controversy, from the Mystery Writers of America. I like to think of my 2018 Edgar nomination for editing the critical LGBTQ+ essay collection Murder in the Closet as something of an institutional penance for that. Now say 69 Hail Marys, MWA!
Despite the entrenched views of some of the mystery field's leading septuagenarian and octogenarian critics, however, I think I have managed to shift the dialogue. Certainly Barry Malzberg, himself then no youngster, thought highly of my essay, as he told me in email correspondence three before his death at age 85 in December 2024.
Out of tact I won't quote his correspondence with me in its entirety but here is part:
Dec. 13, 2021
[X] forwarded your brave, thorough, exceedingly welcome work. Thanks. I have been waiting for someone to stand with me...it has taken more than a quarter of a century....
Dec. 15, 2021
Brilliantly parsed and transcribed defense of Cornell as a survey of the blasted landscape Nevins left behind. Harry Harrison wrote me in a different context half a century ago "You can never catch up with a lie." The lie becomes the canon.
But you tried as I did in my small way and maybe there will be a later verdict if humanity survives.
Jan. 10, 2022
Read it carefully, completely, slowly an hour ago. (CRIMEREADS put it online as you know.) It is masterful. You have performed a great service to humanity....
Jan. 12, 2022
Magnificent job. Hopeless but the Iliad and for that matter LEAR teach us the grandeur of hopeless causation and its enactment.
These words meant a lot to me, though I try not to share Barry's fatalism about the black legend's imperishable supremacy, despite notices like Martin's which make me wonder. I agree with Malzberg about "lies" (or shall we say errors) becoming canon, that's why sometimes we really do have to challenge canonical interpretations by "leading critics." The absolute worst thing we can do, in Woolrich's case, is to say that since Nevins wrote a lot of stuff about him, no one else ever need write about him originally again (except maybe Martin).
To be sure, Malzberg is not the only person from his generation to have praised me for writing the essay. Still I place my greatest hope for a more accurate and insightful picture of Woolrich predominating with critics from the younger generation, like Lucynka, who is a much keener analyst of Woolrich's writing than his "leading critic" and I expect will be even more so in the future. That is of course, as Barry wrote, "if humanity survives."
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| Stop what you're doing! scene from Cornell Woolrich's "Momentum," televised on Alfred Hitchcock Presents |
So please pardon me for thinking that my essays on crime writers "discussed extensively by leading critics" have some value and are at least worth reading. I think my frequently revisionist body of work has value, just as Martin's does. Martin may be more tactful and diplomatic than I, but he has done much, as have I, to discredit many of the contentions made by earlier "leading critics" of British crime fiction like Julian Symons. Sometimes received wisdom needs to be challenged, even if it means stepping on some toes and alienating some people.
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| Cornell in the 1950s in his fifties somewhat worse for wear--or "wracked by diabetes and alcoholism and homosexual self-contempt" as Francis Nevins puts it in those Ballantine book introductions |
I especially appreciated this onsite comment from "Kevin" on my Woolrich essay. I don't know whether or not he's a "leading critic" but he does seem to know what he's talking about:
This is really fascinating, and I applaud your rigor and doggedness in doing the kind of research that Nevins never bothered with. As a former physician/psychiatrist, I think your suggestion that Woolrich likely suffered medical issues leading to lifelong anemia is very astute. I found myself also entertaining a possible diagnosis of schizoid personality disorder. Most of Woolrich's nature and quirks are consistent with this diagnosis, and people with schizoid personality disorder often evoke distrust and even revulsion in others. People sometimes find them "creepy" and "unlikeable."
Good points all, from someone evidently more qualified to expound on this subject than even Woolrich's "leading critic." (Critics! What don't they know?)
Seriously, though, how on earth did we come for decades to delegate to Francis Nevins the last word on the psychological state of Cornell Woolrich? Or so easily come to accept that all his evident mental and physical problems are attributable simply to self-loathing homosexuality? Despite its great length Nevins' biography never with any sophistication whatsoever addresses Woolrich's evident physical and psychological maladies. "Self-hating homosexual" does all the lifting.
That may be a good enough explanation for Nevins, who took the exact same approach with crime queer writers Patricia Highsmith and Milton Propper, and others who have followed him and perhaps it's good enough for Martin as well, but it shouldn't be good enough for the rest of us. Good history is a laboratory where we synthesize ideas, not some posh private club of proclaimed higher authorities who brook no further argument.
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| Woolrich and his other best girl One thing I can agree with others on is that Cornell had mother issues. That happens to men of all sorts however. |
By the way, I'm pleased to announce that Silent as the Grave, Centipede Press' latest high-end collection of Cornell Woolrich short fiction, will be out soon. I wrote the introduction for the volume, and it's one of the rare times someone has written about Woolrich in a high-profile publication without analyzing everything about him under the self-loathing homosexual lens (a prevalent approach around sixty years ago to gay writers among straight male critics who indeed deemed homosexuality a pathological condition). The original version of the intro can be found here. (There were some changes in the story content afterward, necessitating revisions.)
I think I manage to get through the whole introductory piece--quite a substantial one--without even referring to that matter. We can and should do better by the man than the treatment which "leading critics" routinely afforded him for around a half-century, roughly 1970 to 2020. The black legend needs dilution, giving it more than a touch of gray.
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