Centipede Press Cornell Woolrich Great Deal!!!

[mhatchett]

Just Ordered this!!! Happy Birthday to me. I think this is a great deal, on a great collection, of an under appreciated author.

http://www.centipedepress.com/newsle...ouncement.html
Don't miss out!!
MDH

[Ben Staad]

Just Ordered this!!! Happy Birthday to me. I think this is a great deal, on a great collection, of an under appreciated author.

http://www.centipedepress.com/newsle...ouncement.html
Don't miss out!!
MDH

Congrats to you! I'm not familiar with the author and do not have the cash but it looks like a cool collection.

[Martin]

I am also not familiar with this author but the books look nice.

[Dave1442397]

Jared puts out some great books, and he always throws in extras with my order.

[mhatchett]

I am also not familiar with this author but the books look nice.

Maybe too much information but:

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich

Contemporary Authors Online , 2007Updated: February 21, 2007

Born: December 04, 1903 in New York, New York, United States
Died: September 25, 1968 in New York, New York, United States
Nationality: American
Occupation: Writer



"Sidelights"


Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich was the author, under the pseudonym Cornell Woolrich, of many suspense stories and novels in the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. A contributor to the St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers explained that Woolrich wrote "haunting stories of suspense, despair, and lost love, set in a universe controlled by diabolical powers who delight in savaging us." Woolrich's stories inspired the French film noir school of dark, moody crime films in the 1940s and 1950s.

Woolrich's first novels were written in the 1920s and were very much concerned with the wild Jazz Age popularized by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Although Woolrich later believed that these first novels were not very good work, they did launch him into success as a writer. By 1928 Woolrich was writing for films in Hollywood, something he was to do until 1931. During this time he also married Gloria Blackton, the daughter of a silent film producer, but the marriage was annulled after a few months. Woolrich's promiscuous homosexual lifestyle prevented the marriage from being a happy one.

With the Depression of the 1930s, Woolrich turned from writing about the Jazz Age and began writing detective stories for such pulp magazines as Black Mask and Dime Detective. It was during this time that he developed the kind of story for which he would become famous: a suspenseful, riveting, and reckless narrative about desperate characters in a seedy, hopeless world. The St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers contributor explained: "Woolrich is best known as the master of pure suspense, evoking with awesome power the desperation of those who walk the city's darkened streets and the terror that lurks at noonday in commonplace settings.... Woolrich's world is a feverish place where the prevailing emotions are loneliness and fear and the prevailing action a race against time and death.... The typical Woolrich settings are the seedy hotel, the cheap dance hall, the rundown movie house, and the precinct station backroom. The dominant reality in his world is the Depression. Woolrich has no peers when it comes to describing a frightened little guy in a tiny apartment with no money, no job, a hungry wife and children, and anxiety eating him like a cancer. If a Woolrich protagonist is in love, the beloved is likely to vanish in such a way that the protagonist not only can't find her but can't convince anyone that she ever existed. Or, in another classic Woolrich situation, the protagonist comes to after a blackout (caused by amnesia, drugs, hypnosis, or whatever) and little by little becomes convinced that he committed a murder or other crime while out of himself."

Woolrich's ability to create a suspenseful atmosphere has drawn considerable praise from critics who rank him among the suspense genre's best writers. Foster Hirsch, in his The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir, 1981, thought that "Woolrich is a better storyteller than [Dashiell] Hammett or [Raymond] Chandler and a master in building and sustaining tension." Woolrich's stories typically begin in an ordinary setting which Woolrich describes in minute detail. But this innocuous beginning soon gives way to more frightening circumstances. "A dry, reportorial manner, in Woolrich's stories, is invariably a prelude to nightmare, as the seemingly everyday setting and the bland characters come quickly under attack," Hirsch wrote.

In many stories, Woolrich's characters are innocent bystanders suddenly accused of murder or caught up in criminal activities they never wanted. Often they are bewildered by the confusing situation into which they are unexpectedly thrust. "Filled with pitfalls and sudden violence, the landscape in Woolrich is the kind of place where a single wrong turn, a mere chance encounter, triggers a chain reaction in which one calamity follows another," explained Hirsch.

Many critics point to the so-called Black Series of Woolrich suspense novels as his best and most influential work. These novels include The Bride Wore Black, The Black Curtain, Black Alibi, The Black Angel, and The Black Path of Fear. In these novels, Woolrich tells two basic stories: the story of a character wrongly accused of a crime and desperately seeking the real criminal before it is too late and that of a character who has unwittingly learned of a crime and is now being pursued by a criminal who wishes to quiet him for good. Francis Lacassin in an article for Clues: A Journal of Detection believed that Woolrich was intrigued by the "dramatic and psychological richness offered by the ambiguity of this criminal/victim situation."

Some critics commented that the plots of Woolrich's novels are filled with serious lapses in logic. Lacassin called them "gross improbabilities." Francis M. Nevins, in his book Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die, admitted that "as a technical plot craftsman he is sloppy beyond endurance." In many stories, Woolrich's characters sense the location they need to find by some intuitive means, or unlikely coincidences lead to the criminal's identity, or an explanation for behavior is presented that is wildly illogical. Nevins credited these logical slips with a fundamental importance in creating Woolrich's peculiar fictional world of suspense and fear. "In [Woolrich's] most powerful work," Nevins wrote in Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die, "these are not gaffes but functional elements that allow him to integrate contradiction and existential absurdity into his dark fabric." Nevins added: "Long before the Theater of the Absurd, Woolrich knew that an incomprehensible universe is best reflected in an incomprehensible story."

While Woolrich's Black Series of novels inspired the French film noir, a film style that includes such elements as wrongfully accused characters, stalking criminals, and the dark, dangerous streets of a big city, his many short stories, collected in paperback books in the 1940s and 1950s, were widely adapted for films and radio production. Among the best known of these was the Alfred Hitchcock adaptation of Woolrich's story "The Window" as Rear Window, starring James Stewart. The story tells of a man confined to a wheelchair who, with nothing better to do, begins to look out his back window at the apartment building across the street. He soon becomes convinced that he has seen a neighbor murder his invalid wife. When he voices his suspicions, however, nobody believes him. Worse, the neighbor learns of his suspicions and plans to silence him.

Despite Woolrich's financial and critical success, by the late 1950s his personal life was in a shambles. He had lived with his mother since 1931 in a small apartment in New York City where the two of them, caught in a tragic love-hate relationship, barely endured one another's presence. With his mother's death in 1957, Woolrich suffered from a mental collapse. From then until his own death in 1968, he wrote only a few new stories.

Woolrich has achieved a reputation as what the St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers contributor called "the Poe of the 20th century and the poet of its shadows." The contributor went on to note: "Trapped in a wretched psychological environment, understanding his own and everyone's trappedness, he took his decades of solitude and shaped them into the finest body of pure suspense literature ever written."

Some of the author's novels have been reprinted and his stories have appeared in several new collections. In a review of the 2004 reprint of Rendezvous in Black, Detroit Free Press contributor Lev Raphael called the book "beautifully written, psychologically acute and not to be missed." Among the collections of Woolrich's writings is The Cornell Woolrich Omnibus, which includes the complete text of some of Woolrich's most admired noir classics, including I Married a Dead Man and Waltz into Darkness.

The collection Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories contains fourteen previously uncollected stories the author wrote for the pulp fiction magazines of his day, as well as a review of the author's life and work by Francis M. Nevins. A Kirkus Reviews contributor wrote: "Perhaps the biggest surprise in this ragged but provocative collection is the deep sentimentality at the roots of noir." Michael Rogers, writing in Library Journal, noted that the author's "stories go down like a shot of straight whiskey that shocks the senses." Another collection, Tonight, Somewhere in New York: The Last Stories and an Unfinished Novel, includes nine short stories, two autobiographical essays, and the novel referred to in the title. Writing on the Agony Web site, Mario Gusland noted: "By no means minor pieces, the tales included in this new collection are up to the author's fame, entertaining and full of that suspense he's famous for."

[Xiabei]

Found it interesting, until I realized "Crap, I don't even have thirty bucks to spend on books, let alone 300." :-)

[mhatchett]

Found it interesting, until I realized "Crap, I don't even have thirty bucks to spend on books, let alone 300." :-)

It is amazing how much found money You have once your children are out of College! $300.00? One nursing book! HAHAHA!!
MDH