Cornell Woolrich

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Cornell Woolrich

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (born December 4, 1903 in New York City , † September 25, 1968 ibid) was an American writer who is mainly known for his dark crime novels and detective stories. He decisively shaped the “hardboiled type” of the black series and provided numerous templates for (script) films for film noir . Woolrich also wrote under the pseudonyms George Hopley and William Irish .

Life

After his parents divorced, Cornell Woolrich spent the first years of his life with his father, Genaro Hopley-Woolrich, who worked in Mexico and Central America . At the age of 12, Cornell Woolrich came to New York City to live with his mother, Claire Attalie Tarler Hopley-Woolrich. Between 1921 and 1926 he attended Columbia University sporadically ; after the publication of his first novel Cover Charge , he dropped out of his studies.

After his second novel, Children of the Ritz , Cornell Woolrich moved to Los Angeles to write the script for a film based on the novel. The script was then written by William Irish, whose name Woolrich later used as a pseudonym.

In California he married Violet Virginia Blackton, daughter of the film magnate J. Stuart Blackton. The marriage failed from the start due to Woolrich's homosexual tendencies and was later annulled. After the separation, Woolrich left a diary with details of his homosexual experiences.

In 1932 he moved back to his mother in New York at the Hotel Marseilles. Shortly thereafter, Woolrich turned to crime fiction. He first wrote for Groschenhefte in 1934, and his best-known and most successful novels were written in the 1940s and 1950s.

Despite ongoing tensions, Woolrich decided to stay with his mother until she died in 1957. After his mother's death, Cornell Woolrich lived in various hotels in New York City, including for a short time with his aunt Estelle Tarler Garcia in the Hotel Franconia. His health was in poor health, including from excessive alcohol consumption and chain smoking. After a kidnapped infection, a leg had to be amputated in January 1968, after which he largely isolated himself from his fellow human beings. He even did not attend the premiere of the film, made by François Truffaut based on The Bride Wore Black . He died of a stroke on September 25, 1968 and is buried in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. In the last years of his life, Woolrich was friends with the thriller author Michael Avallone (1924–1999), who was interviewed extensively as a witness in Christian Bauer's 1985 documentary Night Without Tomorrow .

In memory of his mother, he donated his $ 850,000 estate to Columbia University to support budding journalists.

To the work

Woolrich's early novels are in the tradition of the jazz era ; he himself was under the literary influence of F. Scott Fitzgerald .

During the Great Depression, Woolrich began to write crime stories, first in the tradition of classic detective stories with clear roles for hero and villain, and shortly afterwards with actions that are characterized by their gloomy atmosphere, oppressive elements of tension and blurred ethics. His early thrillers are quick to write, are of fluctuating quality and have no convincing plot lines; the later novels, especially the serie noire (the “Black” novels ), are more mature.

With these creations, Woolrich is considered to be one of the fathers of noir literature , many of his novels or stories served as models for films by Robert Siodmak ( Phantom Lady ), Alfred Hitchcock ( Das Fenster zum Hof ), François Truffaut ( The bride wore black and Das Secret of the False Bride ), Rainer Werner Fassbinder ( Martha , based on "For the rest of her life") or Ted Tetzlaff ( The uncanny window ) or were dramatized for the radio.

His heroes are almost always simple, rather conventional-looking people who are thrown off course by some circumstance. Characteristic is the laconic attitude of his lonely heroes, often increasing to growing despair. The end of his stories is rarely really happy.

The importance of Woolrich for American crime fiction of the 1940s and 50s and his influence on American crime films of his time are mostly underestimated. Francis Nevins Jr. names Woolrich in his biography First You Dream, Then You Die as the fourth most important crime writer of his time after Dashiell Hammett , Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler . In 1954 he was awarded the prestigious Grand prix de littérature policière for his novel Un pied dans la tombe (German edition unknown. Original: The Body in Grant's Tomb ) . For his novel Hämndens ögonblick (German: Die Tote vom 31. Mai . Heyne, Munich 1970. Original: Rendezvous in Black ) Woolrich received the 1975 Swedish crime prize posthumously in the category of best crime novel translated into Swedish .

Works (selection)

Under the name Cornell Woolrich

Novels of the Jazz Era
  • Cover Charge , Boni & Liveright, New York 1926.
  • Children of the Ritz . Boni & Liveright, New York 1927.
  • Times Square . Horace Liveright Books, New York 1929.
  • Young Man's Heart . Mason Press, New York 1930 (autobiographical).
  • The Time of Her Life . Horace Liveright Press, New York 1931.
  • Manhattan Love Song . Pegasus Press, New York 2006, ISBN 1-93364-807-4 (reprint of New York 1932 edition)
Detective novels
  • The Bride Wore Black . Aeonian Press, Mattituck, NY 1976, ISBN 0-88411-876-2 (EA: Beware the Lady . New York 1940).
  • The Black Curtain (1941)
  • The Black Alibi . New York 1942.
  • The Black Angel . Ballantine Books, New York 1982, ISBN 0-345-30664-3 (EA New York 1943).
    • The black angel . Diogenes, Zurich 2008 [first in 1988, translated by Harald Beck and Claus Melchior], ISBN 978-3-257-23705-4 (EA address: Friedhof . Munich 1971).
  • The Black Path of Fear . Ballantine Books, New Yorkl 1982, ISBN 0-345-30488-8 (EA New York 1944).
    • The black path . Diogenes, Zurich 1988, ISBN 3-257-21627-0 (EA: The dark path of fear , Munich 1974).
  • Savage Bride . Fawcett Press, New York 1950.
  • Hotel Room . Random, New York 1958.
  • Death is my dancing partner . Pyramid Books, New York 1959.
  • The Doom Stone . Avon Books, New York 1960.
  • Into the night . The Mysterious Press, New York 1987, ISBN 0-8929-6200-3 (completed by Lawrence Block).
Short stories (crime, noir)
  • Death Sits in the Dentist's Chair (Detective Fiction Weekly, 1934) (Eng. " Death sits in the dentist's chair ")
  • Walls That Hear You (Detective Fiction Weekly, 1934)
  • Preview of Death (Dime Detective, 1934) (Eng. "Death on Celluloid")
  • Murder in Wax (Dime Detective, 1935) (Eng. "Murder in wax")
  • The Body Upstairs (Dime Detective, 1935) (Eng. "The corpse on the upper floor")
  • Kiss of the Cobra (Dime Detective, 1935) (Eng. "The Kiss of the Cobra")
  • Red Liberty (Dime Detective, 1935) (Eng. "Miss Liberty, blood red")
  • Johnny on the Spot (Detective Fiction Weekly, 1936) (Eng. "Johnny in the trap")
  • Change of Murder (Detective Fiction Weekly, 1936) (Eng. "Mordspech")
  • Waltz (Double Detective, 1937) (Eng. "Waltz")
  • I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes (Detective Fiction Weekly, 1938) (Eng. "Katzenjammer")
  • Three O'Clock (Detective Fiction Weekly, 1938) (German "three o'clock in the afternoon")
  • The Book That Squealed (Detective Story, 1939) ( Eng . "The traitorous book")
  • Guillotine (Black Mask, 1939) (Eng. "The steps to the scaffold")
  • Meet Met by the Mannequin (Dime Detective, 1940) (Eng. "Come to the mannequin")
  • Momentum (Detective Fiction Weekly, 1940) (Eng. "Montreal Express")
  • Post Mortem (Black Mask, 1940)
  • He Looked Like Murder (Detective Fiction Weekly, 1941) (Eng. "Under Suspicion")
  • Nightmare (Argosy, 1941) (Eng. "In the dark of the night") - filmed in 1947 as Fear in the Night
  • Murder at Mother's Knee (Dime Detective, 1941) (Eng. "Pure imagination")
  • Dormant Account (Black Mask, 1942) (German "dormant account")
  • It Had to Be Murder (1942), 1944 as Rear Window relocated
  • Mind Over Murder (Dime Detective, 1943) (Eng. "Cleverness comes before murder")
  • The Black Path of Fear (1944)
  • Rear Window (1944) - originally published in 1942 as It Had to Be Murder under the pseudonym William Irish; filmed in 1954 as Das Fenster zum Hof , directed by Alfred Hitchcock
  • Death Escapes the Eye (Shadow Mystery Magazine, 1947) (Eng. "Death Remains Invisible")
  • Cocaine - filmed as Fall Guy (1947)
  • The Boy Cried Murder (1947)
  • For the Rest of Her Life ( Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine , 1968)

Under the pseudonym William Irish

Under the pseudonym George Hopley

  • Night has a Thousand Eyes (1945) - filmed in 1948 as Night Has a Thousand Eyes (The Night Has a Thousand Eyes)
  • Fright (1950)
  • Marijuana. A drug, crazed killer at large . Dell, New York 1941.

Film adaptations (selection)

Literary reception

In Friedrich Ani's novel The Fool and His Machine (2018) the protagonist, the successful crime writer Cornelius Hallig, chooses his pseudonym in reference to his role model: Georg (> George) Ulrich (> Woolrich). Their biographies are also similar.

literature

  • Mark T. Bassett (Ed.): Blues of a Lifetime. The Autobiography of Cornell Woolrich . Bowling Green, Ohio 1991, ISBN 0-87972-535-4 .
  • Coruinna Hilfers: The crime literature of the "black series" with special consideration of Cornell Woolrich . University, Cologne 1993.
  • Armin Jaemmrich: Woolrich, Cornell . In: Ders .: Hard-Boiled Stories and films noirs. Amoral, cynical, pessimistic? An analysis of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, WR Burnett and other authors as well as relevant films noirs . Self-published, Frankfurt / M. 2012, ISBN 978-3-00-039216-0 , pp. 85-87.
  • Francis M. Nevins Jr .: Cornell Woolrich. First You Dream, Then You Die. The Mysterious Press, New York 1988, ISBN 0-89296-297-6 .
  • David Reid, Jayne L. Walker: Strange pursuit. Crornell Woolrich and the abandoned city of the Forites . In: Joan Copjec (ed.): Shades of Noir . Verso Books, London 1993, ISBN 0-86091-625-1 , pp. 57-96.
  • Thomas C. Renzi: Cornell Woolrich. From “pulp noir” to “film noir” . McFarland, Jefferosn, NC 2006, ISBN 0-7864-2351-X .

Documentation

  • Christian Bauer (director): Night without morning. The world of Cornell Woolrich . BRD 1985, length 45 min., Broadcast on Nord 3, September 1, 1992, 11.10pm.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Woolrich, Cornell
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hopley-Woolrich, Cornell George (full name); Irish, William (pseudonym); Hopley, George (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American crime novelist
DATE OF BIRTH 4th December 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH September 25, 1968
Place of death new York