I Married a Dead Man

Last week, I was in-between books, not knowing what to read, and went browsing through my bookshelf. I found a paperback I had bought some 20 years ago, never having read it. It was Woolrich's "The Black Curtain." I was awe-struck. Not only with the plot, but his prose just jumped out at me. After years of Grishoms, Pattersons, Kings, Balduccis,and others, I realized that THIS was what a true genius writes! He uses words that... Read Full Review

Cornell Woolrich, along with Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, was a key innovator in the development of the noir genre of crime fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. I Married a Dead Man is considered a classic of this uniquely American genre.I am fairly new to Cornell Woolrich as I have only previously read one of his novels, the suspenseful The Bride Wore Black. Woolrich wrote a large number of suspense novels, apparently of... Read Full Review

Cornell Woolrich was the father of film noir and this book certainly reads like it. Think Barbara Stanwyck, who starred in the movie version. One of Woolrich's other stories eventually became REAR WINDOW. The pacing in the novel is remarkable. At first it almost stops as the girl stands in front of a door and later listens to the dial tone as she tries to reach her lover who has left her pregnant and alone. But then it picks... Read Full Review

This is the last novel of Woolrich's main period, before he hit a creative dry spell that lasted until his miserable lonely death of a stroke in 1968. It is also one of his least forgiving: depression, despairing, a look into the hopeless webs of fate that seem to ensnare us. Life, the protagonist tells us is a game -- one we and her are destined to lose. The third person story that falls in-between the first person prologue... Read Full Review

The backhanded praise offered by the reader from Kentucky misses the mark. Questions of Woolrich's ability to hide "illogical" events by a "believable [writing] fashion" are not suitable points to be weighed by one considering reading this book. On the whole the work concerns itself with the mundane. The protagonist is described, at length, moving through hackneyed chores that wouldn't interest her own mother for more than... Read Full Review