Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir

5 Deadline at Midnight: Cornell Woolrich's Night Has a Thousand Eyes

f i v e Deadline at Midnight Cornell Woolrich’s Night Has a Thousand Eyes I Though critics often group Cornell Woolrich with hard-boiled writers like Hammett, Chandler, Cain, and Burnett, Woolrich’s fiction is characterized by a quality present only by turns in the others’ work. Woolrich is primarily a writer of suspense fiction, his trademark the creation of psychological terror so pervasive and paralyzing it seems almost more destructive than the thing feared, a type of story owing much to Poe, though not to the Poe of detective fiction but rather to tales such as “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In the previous chapter we saw how Burnett in High Sierra and The Asphalt Jungle answered the question “Who’s the boss?” for his two protagonists with the words time and death. Woolrich gives essentially the same answer in his work but with this difference: Roy Earle and Dix Handley experience the coercive force of time as a function of their own aging. They find themselves worn-out, middle-aged men in a young man’s game of armed robbery or burglary, and they undergo time’s ultimate coercion in the violent death that became their fate the moment they made the youthful decision to live by the gun, a fate sprung from choice and a choice sprung from character. In contrast, the typi- 124 Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them cal Woolrich protagonist experiences time’s coercive force because he or she foreknows the exact moment when time’s ultimate sanction will fall on them or someone they care for. Woolrich’s best work is about deadlines in the literal sense of the word, and as critics have noted, the typical Woolrich suspense mechanism is the race against time. The effect this exact foreknowledge has on a person’s psyche, on his emotional and moral life, the devastating fear it creates, the hopeless sense of being trapped in a predestined series of events as the seconds slip away, is the psychological vein Woolrich mined with obsessive and consummate skill—indeed, with an obsessiveness, I would argue, largely rooted in Woolrich’s sense of his own life. II Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich was born on December 4, 1903, in New York City, the only child of Genaro Hopley-Woolrich and Claire Attalie Tarler. Of mixed Latin and British descent, Woolrich’s father was born in the state of Oaxaca in Mexico and was a Roman Catholic, the religion in which Cornell was baptized. As Woolrich’s biographer Francis M. Nevins Jr. notes, Genaro was “either a civil engineer or a metallurgist” by profession,1 and three years after Cornell’s birth Genaro and Claire moved to Mexico. Claire was apparently unhappy in Mexico, and when the couple eventually separated (with Claire returning to the Tarler family in New York), young Cornell remained with his father in Mexico until he turned fourteen, when he too returned to New York and his mother’s family. In Blues of a Lifetime, a not entirely reliable memoir left unfinished at his death,Woolrich records two events from his years in Mexico that he felt significantly influenced the rest of his life. The first occurred when his grandfather George Tarler, on a visit to Mexico City, took the eight-year-old Cornell to see a performance of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Noting its “lasting effect” on him, Woolrich describes the performance’s “sudden, sharp insight into color and drama, that came back to the surface again years later when I became a writer.”2 But Woolrich’s biographer Nevins suggests that the opera’s dramatic situation also had a personal resonance for young Cornell and wonders whether “the luckless union of Cio-Cio San and Pinkerton” reminded him “of his own parents,” whether he saw himself and perhaps got “an intimation of his own adult life in the figure of the couple’s child, whose name is Trouble” (7). What Woolrich, “a small boy in a foreign country,” did experience in the opera was an intense sense of identification with the American naval lieutenant Pinkerton. He says, “I walked home on air” with “a secret dream, a secret pride”: “I’m an American. I’m one of them. One of those” (25). The second event from his years in Mexico,he says,occurred“one night when I was eleven and...