Some Cornell Woolrich Book News (Silent as the Grave is out) and Some Thoughts on a Few Woolrich Stories

Silent as the Grave, publisher Centipede's latest edition of Cornell Woolrich short fiction, is available now.  I wrote a substantial introduction for this volume and was able to get a few particular favorite stories in here, including "Dime a Dance" and "Two Fellows in a Furnished Room."  Another one I particularly love, "Mystery in Room 913, "aka "The Room with Something Wrong," was not able to be included on account of space limitation, but it will be in the next volume. 

This collection opens with Woolrich's autobiographical essay "Even God Felt the Depression" and my intro is title "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime Detective?," so you will get the theme of the collection. I thought it might be nice for a change to place analytical emphasis on something other than the question of the author's sexuality.  

I'm hoping  the next volume of Woolrich short crime fiction from Centipede will take not so long as this one did (three years).  I ain't getting any younger!  In the meantime, here are some reflections from me on some of my recent Cornell Woolrich short fiction reads (and rereads).  

Two of these tales, the short story "Humming Bird Goes Home" (Pocket Detective, March 1937) and the novelette "If I Should Die Before I Wake" (Detective Fiction Weekly, July 1937), in 1952 were made into films by Argentinian director Carlos Hugo Christensen, the former as a duo with an adaptation (more like an amplification) of Woolrich's short story "Somebody on the Phone" in the film Never Open the Door.  

"Phone" is really more of a sketch or anecdote tale with a kicker of an original ending that appeared in at least one Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, so the film version must have amplified it considerably.  However there is enough in "Humming Bird" and certainly "Wake" to make longer films without having to add a lot of new material.  

"Feelin' tomorrow like I do today

If I'm Feelin' tomorrow like I do today

I'll pack my trunk and make my getaway."

--"St. Louis Blues"

"Five years was a long time to be alone in the dark."

Never Open That Door

"Humming Bird Comes Home"--in the Bluebeard's Seventh Wife collection the "the" is dropped--is about a vicious city gangster, nicknamed "Humming Bird" because on a job he always hums St. Louis Blues, who returns home to his blind mother in the countryside to hide out after a deadly heist. It is, I think, one of Woolrich's most successful and moving crime tales.  

It's only about 4500 words or less and really has only four characters of any significance (two leads and two supporting, as it were) but it manages to generate some considerable excitement in its depiction of the final confrontation between mother and son, and it has a memorable conclusion.  Inevitably one uses a word like poignant.

As an aside, I simply must quote another great moment in misguided homophobic Francis Nevins Cornell Woolrich literary criticism here.  Nevins, naturally enough, sees this tale, which he terms "haunting," as all about the author's supposed status as a "self-hating homosexual," asking rhetorically: 

Are we to see the gangster son as a stand-in for Woolrich himself, giving form to the self-contempt that sprang from his homosexuality and physical weakness and his career in the lowly pulps, verbalizing his fear that his beloved mother was ashamed of him? 

To which I say: Oh, please, girl!  I don't know that his mother minded at all about Cornell making his mom his best friend, as it were.  ("A man's best friend is his mother," to quote Norman Bates.)  She seems to have liked having him dependent on her and she wasn't ashamed of him in later years; to the contrary, she adored him.  Even if Cornell had been gay and the two of them had ever discussed his sexuality together, which really doesn't seem very likely, why would Woolrich liken being gay unto being a vicious killer?  It's only in Nevins-land, where homosexuality is one of the most benighted states of being on this earth, that that these comparison makes sense.

"Here, little girl, you want some candy?"

"Next day Millie finally broke her record.  She didn't come to school all day....We never saw Millie again."

If I Should Die Before I Wake

"If I Should Die Before I Wake" is one of of Woolrich's classic crime tales--one of his very best--with a child protagonist.  All of his life Woolrich identified with the weak and powerless, and frequently few are more weak and powerless than a young child.  Bullied as a "gringo" adolescent in Mexico, where he had been left in his father's negligent company by his feckless, self-centered mother, Woolrich had a keen perception of the vulnerabilities of youth.  

"Wake" is narrated by "going on twelve" Tommy Lee--not the future Motley Crue drummer, of course--and what a tale he has to tell us. It starts in flashback, back when Tommy was nine, and a girl classmate of his, Mollie Adams, suddenly disappeared one day.  

Woolrich tells this story obliquely, through Tommy's naive perception, so we realize what he doesn't, which is that Mollie was murdered, and quite horrifically, by a strange man who tempted her to a house in the woods with the lure of lollipops--the plump, delicious, luxurious nickel kind, not the cheap, spindly, one-cent dumdum. 

Tommy gives a charming, albeit poignant, depiction of how tempting lollipops were to the kinder in those days.  The treats had only been invented in 1908, so they would have been brand new when Woolrich, born in 1903, was growing up.  "By the 1920s and 1930s," Sparkosweets tells us, "lollipop brands we recognize today were coming to life," including the Tootsie Pop and the fabulous All-Day Sucker.  

The strange man who had befriended Mollie seemingly has stashed away for kids--little girls, specifically--a veritable smorgasbord of suckers. First he gives ingenuous little Mollie her a lime lollipop, then an orange, and the next day he temptingly promises her a cinnamon one.  

Mollie generously shares the first two pops with Tommy--they lick them in turn, which I admit kind of disgusted me--and Tommy boyishly pronounces each one successively his favorite flavor. One really gets to feel how pieces of sugar candy could be such a big deal to these poor Depression-era kiddos. But Tommy never gets his tantalizing taste of cinnamon because Mollie vanishes. 

When I was growing up as a child in Alabama in the Seventies, we were allowed to wander on our bikes all over our extended neighborhood subdivision, full of woods and hills and a lake, our parents never having any idea where we actually were. Pretty much, in my case, from the age of about seven as I recollect.  But of course we were always told "Don't talk to strangers" and "Don't take a ride in a strange car."  A stranger, however ingratiating and persuasive, might well be worse even than some fairy tale monster, his geniality disguising his desire to do bad things to you for some reason.  

My Dad in the late Thirties around the age of nine was allowed to take a bus alone to a neighboring town to see Son of Frankenstein.  He missed the bus on the way back and to reach his homeward destination had to walk several miles in the dark, like Tommy Lee in this story, absolutely terrified of what might be lurking in the shadows. 

I didn't have much of a thing for lollipops per se, though I was crazy for something called "clear toy pops" from a mall store in Birmingham and then quite liked Tootsie Pops, on account of the famous chewy center.  But I never accepted candy from strangers, unless it was on Halloween.  Then we were told to look out for razor blades.  

Anyway, I think you can get the sort of Ray Bradbury-ish whimsy here, but it's coupled with real horror.  It becomes pretty clear that Mollie was not just sexually molested and murdered but also mutilated after death. This is all presented obliquely--and sexual assault is never referred to directly--but it seems pretty bold for a Thirties pulp tale.   

Well, Mollie and the mysterious candy man are forgotten and the killer is never caught, but three years after her death Tommy has made another little girl friend, Jeanie Myers, and Tommy learns one day that a strange man has been giving her lollipops--lime and orange, with the promise of cinnamon....*

*(Cinnamon, incidentally, has long had a sexual, aphrodisiacal connotation and I imagine Woolrich was aware of this.)    

Then, you guessed it, Jeanie disappears and when childish Tommy finally connects the dots in his head no one--not his grouchy, middle-aged, spinsterish teacher nor his mother nor his stern police detective dad--will listen to the story he tries to tell them.  So it's up to him to find the house of lollipops in the wood--like the witch's gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel--and rescue Jeanie, who he is sure is now in the clutches of the sinister lollipop man....

"A clue is any little thing that don't seem to belong where it's found."

I'm not surprised "Wake" was filmed; it's one of Woolrich's best tales.  In America in 1951 the 1931 child murderer film M was remade, with David Wayne, television's future Inspector Queen (aka Ellery's Dad) taking the notorious Peter Lorre role, but apparently it took Argentina bravely to take on Woolrich's child molester and murderer tale.  

Two years after "Wake" was originally published in 1937, Woolrich in Black Mask published a variation on it, "Through a Dead Man's Eye."  It's a very good story too, but it's almost the same story, shorn of the chivalrous element (no little girls in grave peril).  There's a 12-year-old boy, his 35-year-old police detective father, a cute childish bit ("swapping" instead of lollipops) and, yes, peril at a lonely house out in the country.  

The boy in this tale, Frankie--a plucky reader of Black Mask, where the story was published (nice meta touch, that)--is actually a much better detective than Tommy, who merely follows, rather implausibly, a chalk trail left by the missing girl. 

Honestly, Tommy, while basically goodhearted, isn't exactly aces in the brains department, even considering his age. Frankie, on the other hand, is a bold young chap, at one point shouting at the murderer, whom he is facing down all alone in a night dark house: "You can kill me like you did him, but I'm not afraid of you.  My pop and every cop in the city'll get even on you, you dirty murderer, you.  You stink!"  Quite a show of bravado, if a bit unlikely.  

"Eye" is a perfectly valid tale and quite good in its own right, but its imitativeness is too readily apparent.  It also lacks the fantastical and genuinely horrific elements in "Wake," which not inappositely quotes this plaintive, rather morbid children's prayer, which sadly so many cruelly mistreated children over the centuries have dearly needed:

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

What Do You Do with a Phantom Sailor Suit? A New Note with Some "New" Old Evidence on Cornell Woolrich, the Blackton Sisters and the Infamous Story of the Sex Diary

What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor

What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor

What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor

Early in the Morning

Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor

Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor

Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor

Early in the Morning 

--"Drunken Sailor," Trad. Sea Shanty

Cornell on the left, Bill on the right

The linchpin of Francis Nevins' claim that Cornell Woolrich was a "self-loathing homosexual" is the infamous sailor suit story.  Woolrich had gone out from New York to Los Angeles, California, to write screenplays for Hollywood and there in 1930 at the age of 27 he met 20-year-old Violet Virginia Blackton, who preferred to go by the name Gloria and was nicknamed by her family "Bill."  She was one of two daughters of film director J. Stuart "Commodore" Blackton, her elder half-sister, by a full decade, being Marian Constance Blackton.  Blackton was nicknamed Commodore on account of having been Commodore of the Atlantic Yacht Club when the family lived in Brooklyn, New York. In the Twenties they moved out to California with the movie industry.  By 1930, with the onset of the Depression, the Blacktons were a bit on their uppers.

Woolrich vs. Woolrich
on this side Gloria, aka Bill

Young Bill and Cornell eloped on Dec. 6, 1930 but the marriage, which was never consummated, merely lasted, it is variously stated, less than three weeks or perhaps three months, before Cornell flew the coop and moved back to New York, leaving Bill a continent behind him. 

Nearly a half-century later, in 1977, when she was 76-years old, Marian Blackton, now Marian Trimble, was interviewed by Francis Nevins about her sister's marriage; and she produced, according to Nevins, quite a tale to tell. 

According to Nevins in his 1988 biography of Woolrich, Marian told him that Bill had told her that Woolrich had left a diary behind by mistake, in which he detailed having had in California a great many sexual encounters with other men, "in sordid and dreadful detail" (Nevins' words).  

Marian claimed too, according to Nevins, that Woolrich had also kept a sinister locked suitcase under his bed, which curious Bill took a peek into one day when Woolrich left it unlocked--such a careless boy and a curious girl--and found a sailor suit in it.  Horrors! 

Supposedly, according to Bill, according to Marian, according to Nevins, the shy and timid Woolrich, all 122 pounds of him (this is what he weighed according to his 1942 draft registration card), had a habit at night of dressing up in this sailor suit and going cruising for gay sex at the LA docks.  

on this side Cornell

"Clearly," intones Nevins shudderingly, "[Woolrich's] homosexual life was of the most furtive and sordid variety, a side of himself that he despised and was ashamed of, that he could neither accept nor suppress, that he never acknowledged publicly and dropped down the memory hole...."

Wow! This puts a lot of weight on a sex diary and a sailor suit that no one had ever seen, allegedly, besides long-dead Bill and a supposed parade of anonymous gay men.  We have no actual evidence besides this story, ostensibly from Marian and before her Bill, that these things ever existed.  (According to Barry Malzberg, Nevins played only a barely-audible recording of the Marian Trimble interview back to him.)

And the fact that there is no other evidence, or any evidence really, becomes evidence that not only was Woolrich gay but that he was one of those furtive and sordid ones, closeted and self-loathing.  (Yet he kept a diary about it all too!)

Marian, according to Nevins, went on to tell how Bill was brokenhearted by all this but didn't hold any grudges against Woolrich and behaved magnanimously.  "She was still in love with him and she was heartbroken," Nevins quotes Marian as telling him of Bill.  

In 1933, Bill filed in New York to have the marriage annulled, on the grounds that it had never been consummated.   Nevins speculates that the imminent exposure of Woolrich's homosexuality--he just takes it for granted at this point--must have had the author "keyed up and quivering with terror;" but fortunately for him Bill, "a decent person," said nothing about the "true ground for the action."

Bill complained that Con gave
more attention to his typewriter
than he did to her.

I looked into this part of the story when I wrote my Woolrich article in 2022 and found that a lot of Nevins' telling of the affair was flat wrong. Bill actually went to New York in 1932 to launch a stage career and while there the next year brought her annulment suit against Woolrich to a fanfare of national newspaper publicity. 

Bill didn't say Cornell was gay, she said he was a pallid sexless aesthete who could not perform his husbandly duties.  Considering that Woolrich wrote racy Jazz Age novels and romance fiction at the time, this was very damaging to his reputation, besides being personally humiliating.  It became crystal clear that, when it came to the he-man stuff, Cornell was just a pretender.  Nevins in 2010 told radio interviewer Leonard Lopate that Bill never did anything to embarrass Woolrich during the annulment, a claim, as we have seen, which simply could not be more incorrect.  

Bill also blithely claimed to the newspapers that she was the one who walked out on him. In the papers she was fawningly portrayed all around as beautiful and physical and dynamic, everything Woolrich was not.  One might be forgiven for thinking that Bill had cynically exploited her marriage with Woolrich to publicize her own stage career (which never went anywhere anyway).  

Woolrich himself pathetically told the newspapers: "We had a terrific fuss and Gloria left me.  I guess she couldn't understand why I was so quiet.  When she left the world fell in upon me just as if there had been an earthquake."  

a pair of strapping happy American sailors
(neither of them Cornell)

This doesn't sound anything at all like Nevins' account, nor Marian's, nor Bill's, nor whoever it was that may originally narrated it.  It's amazing to me that for over four decades, until I published my article at Crimereads, no one had ever unearthed this material from public records.  Instead people just salaciously repeated the same flimsy tittle-tattle as hard fact.  

Here's Thomas C. Renzi, who died at age 71 in 2019, in his 2015 book Cornell Woolrich from Pulp Noir to Film Noir.  He writes that information about Woolrich's supposed homosexuality 

comes from an objective source, Nevins' biographical opus of the author....Woolrich turned out to be a backstreet homosexual....he would dress in a sailor suit and comb the derelict dives and dens of the seedy waterfront for the kind of entertainment he could never find at home.

Stuart Blackton with his son Stuart, Jr. and his big-bowed younger daughter Violet
soon to become Gloria, aka Bill.  Note the boy's sailor suit.

Woolrich pictured in a 1927 
newspaper article when
he went out to Hollywood.
Said the interviewer of him:
"He was so boyish we
thought he had sent down a
younger brother to say that
the real Cornell Woolrich 
would be down in a minute."

Then there's Eddie Muller, 67, in his introduction to Open Road's 2020 reprint of one of Woolrich's finest crime novels, The Bride Wore Black:

Woolrich was a compulsive liar, always rewriting facts to tell a better story.  We do know, thanks to Nevins' research, that Woolrich was a self-loathing gay man whose lifelong residency in a locked closet no doubt contributed to the secrecy and paranoia which drips from the stories.  

At least Muller varies the take slightly by calling Woolrich a "self-loathing gay man" rather than a "self-loathing homosexual" but Nevins, 83, and Renzi, who would be 78 were he alive today, evidently could never bring themselves to utter the word gay in their writing. 

Instead it's always the very clinical homosexual, punctuated with very disapproving phrases like "backstreet homosexual," which sound like they come out of one of those scarifying antigay Fifties high school "educational" films.  

The notion that Nevins is an objective source for all this is highly questionable, I would say.  As early as 1971, six years before he interviewed Marian Trimble and extracted the diary and suitcase stories, evidently, Nevins had already proclaimed that Woolrich was "obsessed with the fear that he was homosexual."  This seems to have been the genesis in print of the "Cornell was gay" thesis.  

Jeanne Moreau as the title character
in The Bride Wore Black (1968)

Where did Nevins get the "facts" for that claim in 1971, three years after Woolrich's death?  I have no idea, actually.  All I know is that Nevins has been hugely attached to this theory for at least 55 years, practically the whole of my own lifetime.  He also has applied it as the explanation for other gay crime writers' problems. Maybe this is as much or more about Nevins as it is Woolrich.  

In a contemporary review of Nevins' 1988 biography Charles Champlin of the LA Times writes, truthfully enough, that "the seven page introduction that Nevins wrote for the 1980s Ballantine editions [of Woolrich's novels] revealed almost as much about Woolrich as the 600-page long biography."  

I'd honestly be very much surprised if many people have "read" Nevins' biography.  (This is an even less likely feat today, in our postliterate era, when I've had some people complain my own forty-page Woolrich essay is too long.)  The Nevins bio is more a book you dip into briefly, like an encyclopedia, then come up for air.  

Where Champlin goes wrong is when he asserts that Nevins "gleaned [Woolrich's life] to the last crumpled scrap of copy paper."  Nevins, relying heavily on personal interviews. in fact did little work in the contemporary newspaper and census records, for example. And evidence that contradicted the self-hating homosexual thesis had a way of not making into into the book.  

Marian Blackton in 1922
at age 21

Whatever his motivations and his own obsessions, Nevins certainly has established none of these contentions about the sex diary and the sailor suit as "fact."  Contrary to what Muller wrote, we don't "know" that the author was a self-loathing gay man who lived his life in a locked closet.  We don't know what his sexuality was.  He could have been gay, straight, bisexual or asexual--pay your money and take your chance.  

We do know that Woolrich had a mother fixation and trouble relating with strangers.  And he does seem to have had considerable self-esteem issues and possibly a masochistic streak. But the homosexuality stuff has always been speculative, nailed down by absolute hearsay which never should have been trotted out as factual.  It's as substantial as the vaporous claim that J. Edgar Hoover was a cross dresser.  It would be quite plausible to me that Woolrich never had sex with anyone.  

But here's another interesting new "fact"--and it is a fact.  Eight years after her interview with Nevins, Marian Trimble published a biography of her father in 1985, when she was 84 years old.  And in it there's a page about her sister Bill and Cornell's marriage!  I have known about the existence of this book for four years but only recently was able to get my hands on a copy of it.  I'm going to quote the entirely of the Bill-Cornell passage:

speaking of "sailors"
Commodore Blackton
a pioneering filmmaker and
the father of Marian and Violet, 
aka Gloria, aka Bill

Bill (Gloria) was the first to break away from our gay [family] quintette.  To our utter astonishment, and quite without need to do so, she eloped with Cornell Woolrich, a sandy-haired, impecunious young writer from New York.  Some bright agent had sold him across the Continent as New York's brightest gift to Hollywood. Cornell didn't think this was so, and presently demonstrated his conviction.  He flopped quietly and completely.  

Lean, hungrier looking than Cassius, Mr. Woolrich enslaved Bill's mother-complexed emotions within the first hour of their meeting.  And one day came the wire, "Bill and I have taken the plunge hand in hand," signed Cornell.  

When the apprehensive couple returned from the honeymoon trip, to stand, hand in hand, awaiting the family reproof, they were greeted with a few, quiet, amiable words from my father and an absent-minded "Oh hello" from T. [her brother] and me.  Then everybody went on as if nothing had happened.  

This was in September.  Just before Christmas Cornell eloped again, this time all by himself, leaving Bill to clutch at the furniture and make hideous sobbing sounds whenever the radio played "Body and Soul" or "I Surrender, Dear," which, in 1931, was practically all the time.

the Commodore and daughter Marian

My father and I made inept, inarticulate attempts to ease Bill's agony.  She was not to be consoled.  For fully six weeks Bill never got over it.  When, at last, Mr. Woolrich explained to her by phone that it had all been a terrible mistake, Bill made him a dignified farewell.  She then went out and bought a new shade of eyeshadow, a gesture we all applauded as a sign that the the worst had passed and we could now safely hear the two current hit songs through to the end.

That's it, just under 300 words devoted to the matter which so preoccupied Nevins and his followers.  Some of the facts are discernably wrong, like Marian's statement that Bill and Cornell eloped in September.  The documentary record clearly states it was December 6, 1930.  If the couple really parted before Christmas, the two lived together for less than three weeks.  This would seem to comport with the idea that Cornell realized he would not be able actually to have sex with Bill.  (Three months, conversely, seems a long time for that realization to dawn.)  

"I Surrender, Dear," a big Bing Crosby hit, was not released until February 5, 1931, so it doesn't seem like Bill would have been sobbing wildly to that tune in the weeks following their breakup.  

By the way, the lyrics to this song run 

"I may seem proud/And I may act gay/That's just a pose/I'm not that way."  Words for the wise.  

Woolrich came out to Hollywood in 1927 because his second youthful novel, Children of the Ritz, published when he was just 24 years old, won a $10,000 prize and was optioned by a film studio, but Marian does not credit him with that.  The tone she adopts toward him is sardonic and more than a bit contemptuous. What she does NOT talk about is Cornell Woolrich being gay, the sailor suit or the sex diary.  So what we are left with is what Nevins stated she said to him back in 1977.  

the first film adapted from a Woolrich novel

The truth is we don't know that this phantom diary and cruising sailor suit ever existed, even though when Nevins spoke with Leonard Lopate, he stated that Bill returned the diary to Woolrich and declared that he destroyed it.  This is actually what we call assumptions.  And we all know that when you assume, you make an ass u me.  

By phone I talked to writer Anthony Slide, who prepared Marian's manuscript for book publication 41 years ago, and he told me that he didn't cut anything from her Woolrich account, certainly not anything about sex diaries and sailor suits.  Much to the contrary, he says he would certainly have left such material in.  

So why didn't Marian talk about any of this in her book like she apparently did with Nevins?  Is it possible she was simply fancifying to Nevins?  Or that Bill was fancifying to her?  We just can't know at this point.  But Bill, even according to her own half-sister, was not the most stable and reliable of persons herself.  

Certainly Bill Blackton had a flair for the dramatic. After breaking up with Cornell, she took up enthusiastically with a rail-thin carnival "premature burial hypnotist" named Rudy--evidently big-boned Bill had a pash for scrawny men--who wanted to put her under a trance and bury her in a coffin six feet underground. Happily for Bill's future existence in the material world, the city police stepped in at that point.  (Interestingly, one of Cornell Woolrich's suspense tales drew upon this general subject.)

On the phone with me tonight Anthony Slide described the Blackton family as "pretty weird."  Only the brother was a "solid citizen," according to Marian, who herself was bisexual and had a later-in-life intimate relationship with Margerie Bonner, widow of novelist Malcolm Lowry.  

now here are some gay sailors

Cornell was pretty weird too, to be sure.  But was he a "self-loathing homosexual"?  There is no way anyone can responsibly state this as a fact, or even a likelihood, though people have been insisting on it for forty years.  

Cornell was frequently self-loathing and a sad mess in many ways, yes. In my opinion his problems, going all the way back to his neglected childhood, went far beyond any sexuality he may have had.  As an adult his encounter with the flaky Bill was, for him, epochal, because it exposed him, an exceedingly emotionally fragile person, to national humiliation as a pathetic sexless eunuch; and he never recovered from this degradation. It unalterably changed, and, on a personal level, largely destroyed, Woolrich's life, though it gave us the priceless black legacy of Cornell's crime fiction.  

Was this callous destruction worth the personal emotional cost to the author? That Nevins, getting it precisely ass-backwards, portrays young Bill Blackton, rather than Woolrich, as the victim in all of this, is the sort of sad irony that the author himself endlessly depicted in his crime writing.  Rather than a forgiving angel of mercy, Bill in the end behaved like the vengeful title character in Woolrich's The Bride wore Black--though her motivation was for more ignoble than the Bride's, perverse as that may have been.  

After the advent of Hurricane Gloria, Cornell Woolrich took what shelter he could, living n apartment-bound, isolated existence, for nearly three decades with his doting mother, then, after her death, for another decade alone in ever-increasing squalor. He was agoraphobic and anemic and paranoid and mother fixated, for sure, probably masochistic too.  (That certainly shows up in his writing.) Whether he was actually gay is a mystery, and largely an ancillary matter to the story of the author's life.  Don't let that phantom sailor suit of the last four decades bemuse you.  

the briefly happy couple

Arkenshaw Annals: And Shame the Devil (1967) and Serpent's Tooth (1971), by Sara Woods

first American edition
reprinted by Dell

One thing I enjoy about Sara Woods is how she varied her London settings with more than occasional jaunts to Yorkshire, taking her brilliant barrister-sleuth Antony Maitland up north to her own native ground, where she was born in 1916 and after the Great War grew up into adulthood in the 1920s and 1930s.  In 1967 in the detective novel And Shame the Devil, she introduced to her loyal readers the city of Arkenshaw, "one of the smoke-grimed industrial cities of the West Riding."  

Here the author takes on what was then, and is again now, a very topical issue: immigration from Asia to the United Kingdom.  In the 1960s, after the partition of India in 1947, Pakistani immigration to the UK increased hugely, as demand for labor in Britain rose.  In just the five years between 1961 and 1966, the British Pakistani population nearly sextupled, up to around 120,000.  

By no means all of the native British population was pleased with this, despite the fact that Pakistanis provided vital labor in the textile mills, the medical services and transportation industries and other areas.  Sara Woods tackles this unease in Devil, where Antony Maitland defends a pair of British policeman, Sergeant Duckett and Constable Ryder, from the charge of having wrongfully arrested two Pakistani immigrants for burglary.  Duckett is known to have nativistic attitudes, but, Antony Maitland decides, as is his wont, that something more complex is going on in his latest case.  

Devil is one of Sara Woods' finest criminal concoctions, with strong local color and good characterization (Duckett's stern astrology enthusiast grandmother is a particular delight) and a strongly plotted mystery that keeps you reading on.  The climax, which involves a deadly confrontation during a choral performance of Handel's Messiah, is inspired and makes one long for a television adaptation.  Murder fanciers, don't fret, a murder takes place late in the book and an older one is uncovered.  

As an aside, I can't help thinking how well the Maitland books would televise.  I'm sure fans would love to see screen incarnations of recurring print characters like Maitland himself, his uncle Nicholas Harding, his wife Jenny, his colleague Vera Langhorne, his police friends and adversaries like Inspectors Sykes and Briggs, stage actress Meg Hamilton, her husband Roger Farrell and others.  Devil definitely would be one of my recommendations for filming early on.  

I have no idea how Sara Woods derived inspiration for the name Arkenshaw.  I see he is a character in the card game Magic but that could not have been it, as these books long predated it.    

British edition

Whatever the inspiration, Woods obviously loved this setting she had devised with Arkenshaw.  In a 1972 Canadian newspaper interview she proclaimed Devil her favorite among her then fifteen plus books.  The year before she had returned Antony to Arkenshaw in another fine tale, Serpent's Tooth, in which Antony defends a seventeen-year-old boy charged with the murder of his foster father.  

It's a highly classic murder--the man was violently done in behind a closed door with a poker in the living room--but this is a detective story that never would have been written in the Golden Age of detective fiction.  The characters are too humble, for one thing.  

The foster parents, a Catholic couple by the name of Baker, are locally famous for having taken in thirteen foster children--now, at the time of Joe's trial, ages 3 to 19.  Everyone agrees the Bakers are wonderful people, so the question for Antony becomes, why did Joe--who has confessed his guilt--do it?  Joe himself isn't saying.  The answer to this mystery is held closely for most of the novel.  

Tooth is much shorter than Devil--my estimate is some 50,000 words vs. some 90,000 words)--but sparer as it is, it still makes an impact.  Woods brings back some of the characters from Devil and introduces some good new ones, like the mother superior of the local convent school.  (Woods, a Catholic, went to one such institution herself.)  I know that Antony Maitland had at least two additional cases set in Arkenshaw; I hope they both are as good as these two.

And Shame the Devil is being reprinted this year and Serpent's Tooth in 2027.

Dark Indeed! A Recent Blog Notice of My Book Nothing Darker Than the Night (2025), with a Consideration of My Cornell Woolrich Criticism

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).  

Ironically, Fredric Brown does have a leading critic, his biographer Jack Seabrook, and Jack has been very kind about my own substantial essay on Brown's life, in which I detailed a great deal of new information about the author.  At Crimereads Jack commented about my essay: "This is an outstanding piece of scholarship that makes for fascinating reading!"  

Certainly the position I outline above--that one need not write about authors already much-discussed by leading critics--has been one that Martin has declined to adopt regarding 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 whom he patently admired, like Julian Symons.  I think Martin might even have discussed, rather less unorthodoxly, Hammett, Chandler and Woolrich in a certain book of his from this decade.  

In my case I brought both original thought and research to my work on such writers as Hammett, Chandler, Woolrich, Ross Macdonald and Patricia Highsmith (much of which preceded Martin's own).  Reading Martin's notice, I had to wonder whether he had actually yet read any of these essays on them.  If he does read them someday, 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.  Kevin Burton Smith linked  my article at this Thrilling Detective website, saying "Curtis Evans gets his hands bloody, tracking the possible inspirations for Hammett's first novel."  

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.  

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:

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). 

As blogger Lucynka has noted of Nevins' book:

it is a slog (600+ pages, and most of that is story summaries, not legitimate biographical information, and worse yet, there's no clear distinction between the two.  Do I really want to read a 10-page summary of Woolrich's first novel--thereby spoiling every single plot point for myself--just so I can cobble together a mere paragraph's worth of personal information?) 

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.  

It really would make a fine doorstop.

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.  At the cool lima bean blog, Jeff Powanda has avowed: "I can't recall another biography in which it's been so apparent that the author had complete contempt for his subject."

In my Woolrich essay I have documented the gleeful zest with which Nevins often ridicules Woolrich.  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.  

Blogger Lucynka wrote here, coincidentally just four days before my Woolrich essay was published: "Francis Nevins, author of the 1988 Woolrich biography, seems convinced he was homosexual (and seemingly everyone since then has echoed/exaggerated this theory, such that you now see it stated as ABSOLUTE FACT)....I gotta say...I'm not really picking up on any queer vibes...."

My Woolrich 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.  Meanwhile Nevins' book has, I believe, been out-of-print since the 1990s.  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.  

About Cornell Woolrich's 
disastrous marriage there
is a difference of opinion.

But 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. 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 with the openminded.  Certainly Barry Malzberg, himself then no youngster, thought highly of my essay, as he told me in email correspondence three years 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 of it:

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, whose original feminist approach to the author makes for a much keener analysis of Woolrich's writing than that of his leading critic. That is of course, as Barry wrote, "if humanity survives."

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.  

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. Magically, "self-hating homosexual" does all the lifting.  

That may be a good enough explanation for Nevins, who took the exact same approach with queer crime 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.  

*(Get a load of Nevins' insight into the psyche of Patricia Highsmith: "If you think Cornell Woolrich was something of a psychopath and a creep, you don't know the meaning of those words until you've encountered Highsmith.  Both, of course were homosexual.  I gather...that Highsmith...was never terribly comfortable with being a lesbian."  History repeats itself! With queer people, in Nevins' eyes, the problem inevitably seems to be the queerness.)

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.

In a closing note 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, to quote a keystone boomer rock band, a touch of gray.  

Book of Tobit: Past Praying For (1968), by Sara Woods

The Book of Tobit is an apocryphal biblical text, still found, so I read, in Catholic Bibles but not Protestant ones, which tells the tale of Tobit, Tobit's son Tobias and Sarah.  On a journey to recover ten silver talents owed to his family Tobias, guided by the archangel Raphael, meets Sarah, who as it happens is rather afflicted with a jealous demon, Asmodeus, in her life.  This dreadful fellow, it seems, has slain Sarah's previous seven husbands (who says seven is a lucky number), but brave Tobias, who is smitten as well with Sarah (she must have been really something), with Raphael's assistance vanquishes demonic Asmodeus and lives happily ever after in wedded bliss with his bride.  Seems like some of the most entertaining parts of the Bible ended up in the Apocrypha!

Wedding of Tobias and Sarah; Raphael Binds the Demon, by Jan Steen, c. 1660

In Past Praying For, the fourteenth of Sarah Woods' Anthony Maitland detective novels, the author seems to have drawn a bit on the Book of Tobit.  Her barrister sleuth Maitland jocularly mentions the story to his uncle, Sir Nicholas Harding, who in 1965, when the novel is primarily set, is defending a certain Camilla Barnard (her maiden name is Spencer!) on the charge of having murdered her second husband.  Beleaguered Camilla has already served four years in prison for having shot to death her prior husband in 1957.  Both her dead husbands were Barnards, second cousins in fact, and members of the family firm, a Yorkshire manufacturer of kitchen and bathroom fixtures.  

Asmodeus
pretty sure this illustration is from the 1980s 
Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual
Traditionally I think that he's portrayed
as rather less human.

Anyway, Uncle Nick is having trouble coming up with a good defense for Camilla, so Antony whimsically suggests pinning the crime on Asmodeus:

"There's always Asmodeus....You might try it on the jury....There was this lass--Sara, I think her name was--and they kept on marrying her off, and every time a devil called Asmodeus killed the bridegroom on his wedding night.  She got through seven perfectly good husbands that way, which I admit seems a trifle excessive."

Antony was involved in Camilla's prosecution eight years earlier and it was his empathetic questioning that actually got Camilla off with a mere four-year sentence. (Her husband Alan apparently was an emotionally and physically abusive adulterer.)  

Camilla then married, on the rebound, Alan's stodgy "safe" second cousin Oliver. Most unfortunately, Oliver has recently died from consuming an arsenic-laden rice pudding prepared by Camilla herself.  Camilla does always seem to be stepping in it, as it were!

Great jacket by Paddington illustrator 
Fred Banbery does justice to a great
Sixties crime novel

Defending Camilla Spencer Barnard (twice over) looks like a tall task indeed, but with Anthony doing detecting behind the scenes, anything is possible.  He's pulled miracles, along with scribbled old envelopes, out of his pocket before in thirteen recorded instances now.

In many ways this is a delightfully traditional detective novel, complete with a floor plan, a family tree, a wealthy old family firm, old family servants and poison in the pudding.  There are questions about just who could have gotten to that rice pudding in the kitchen on the fatal day and Antony's wife Jenny makes a very pertinent point about nutmeg.  I happen to love rice pudding myself and have made it many times, but never with arsenic, let me assure you.  

A highly recommended Sixties detective novel that is being reprinted, along with four other Sixties Sara Woods this year, by Dean Street Press.  Read it!

my recent rice pudding, some nutmeg already added before cooking
No arsenic, guv'nor, I swear!