Night has a
Thousand Eyes
Cornell Woolrich
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK
“Thus death is nothing terrible; …
But the opinion we have of death, that
it is terrible, that is wherein the terror lieth.”
—Encheiridion of Epictetus
(T. W. Rolleston’s translation)
Contents
Introduction by Francis M. Nevins
1 The Meeting
2 The Telling
3 End of the Telling: Beginning of the Wait
4 Beginning of Police Procedure
5 The Wait: Bodyguard Against Planets
6 Police Procedure: Dobbs and Sokolsky
7 The Wait: Flight of the Faithful
8 Police Procedure: Schaefer
9 The Wait: Deeps of Night
10 Police Procedure: Dobbs and Sokolsky
11 The Wait: Farewell to Sunlight
12 Police Procedure: Molloy
13 The Wait: The Last Supper
14 Police Procedure: Dobbs and Sokolsky
15 The Wait: Mid-evening
16 Police Procedure: Molloy
17 The Wait: Moments Before Eternity
18 Hue and Cry
19 End of Police Procedure
20 End of the Wait
21 End of Night
Introduction
Francis M. Nevins
Noir.
Any French dictionary will tell you that the word’s primary meaning is black, dark or gloomy. But since the mid-1940s and when used with the nouns roman (novel) or film, the adjective has developed a specialized meaning, referring to the kind of bleak, disillusioned study in the poetry of terror that flourished in American mystery fiction during the 1930s and forties and in American crime movies during the forties and fifties. The hallmarks of the noir style are fear, guilt and loneliness, breakdown and despair, sexual obsession and social corruption, a sense that the world is controlled by malignant forces preying on us, a rejection of happy endings and a preference for resolutions heavy with doom, but always redeemed by a breathtakingly vivid poetry of word (if the work was a novel or story) or image (if it was a movie).
During the 1940s many American books of this sort were published in French translation in a long-running series called the Serie Noire, and at the end of World War II, when French film enthusiasts were exposed for the first time to Hollywood’s cinematic analogue of those books, they coined the term film noir as a phrase to describe the genre. What Americans of those years tended to dismiss as rather tawdry commercial entertainments the French saw as profound explorations of the heart of darkness, largely because noir was so intimately related to the themes of French existentialist writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and because the bleak world of noir spoke to the despair which so many in Europe were experiencing after the nightmare years of war and occupation and genocide. By the early 1960s cinephiles in the United States had virtually made an American phrase out of film noir and had acclaimed this type of movie as one of the most fascinating genres to emerge from Hollywood. Noir directors—not only the giants like Alfred Hitchcock (in certain moods) and Fritz Lang but relative unknowns like Edgar G. Ulmer, Jacques Tourneur, Robert Siodmak, Joseph H. Lewis and Anthony Mann—were hailed as visual poets whose cinematic style made the bleakness of their films not only palatable but fantastically exciting.
Foster Hirsch’s The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir (1981) and several other books on this genre have been published in the United States and one can attend courses on film noir at any number of colleges. But there has not yet developed the same degree of interest in the doom-haunted novels and tales of suspense in which film noir had its roots. Although Raymond Chandler, the poet of big-city corruption, and James M. Cain, the chronicler of sexual obsession, have received the fame they deserve, the names of countless other noir writers are known mainly to specialists.
I have three names for one of those writers. He was the Poe of the twentieth century, the poet of its shadows, the Hitchcock of the written word. His name was Cornell Woolrich.
He was born in New York City on December 4, 1903 to parents whose marriage collapsed in his youth. Much of his childhood was spent in Mexico with his father Genaro HopleyWoolrich, a civil engineer. At age eight the experience of seeing a traveling French company perform Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in Mexico City gave Woolrich a sudden sharp insight into color and drama and his first sense of tragedy. Three years later he understood fully that someday like Cio-Cio-San he too would have to die, and from then on he was haunted by a sense of doom that never left him. I had that trapped feeling, like some sort of a poor insect that you’ve put inside a downturned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can’t, and it can’t, and it can’t.
During adolescence he returned to Manhattan and lived in an opulent house on 113th Street with his mother and her socially prominent family. In 1921 he entered Columbia College, a short walk from home. He began writing fiction during an illness in his junior year and quit school soon afterward to pursue his dream of becoming another F. Scott Fitzgerald. His first novel, Cover Charge (1926), chronicled the lives and loves of the Jazz Age’s gilded youth in the manner of his own and his whole generation’s literary idol. This debut was followed by Children of the Ritz (1927), a frothy concoction about a spoiled heiress’ marriage to her chauffeur, which won him a $10,000 prize contest and a contract from First National Pictures for the movie rights. Woolrich was invited to Hollywood to help with the adaptation and stayed on as a staff writer. Besides his movie chores and an occasional story or article for magazines like College Humor and Smart Set, he completed three more novels during these years. In December 1930 he entered a brief and inexplicable marriage with a producer’s daughter—inexplicable because for several years he had been homosexual. After the marriage he continued his secret life, prowling the waterfront at night in search of partners, and after the inevitable breakup Woolrich fled back to Manhattan and his mother. The two of them traveled extensively in Europe during the early 1930s. His only novel of that period was Manhattan Love Song (1932), which anticipates the motifs of his later suspense fiction with its tale of a love-struck young couple cursed by a malignant fate which leaves one dead and the other desolate. But over the next two years he sold almost nothing and was soon deep in debt, reduced to sneaking into movie houses by the fire doors for his entertainment.
In 1934 Woolrich decided to abandon the literary world and concentrate on mystery-suspense fiction. He sold three stories to pulp magazines that year, ten more in 1935, and was soon an established professional whose name was a fixture on the covers of Black Mask, Detective Fiction Weekly, Dime Detective and countless other pulps. For the next quarter century he lived with his mother in a succession of residential hotels, going out only when it was absolutely essential, trapped in a bizarre love-hate relationship that dominated his external world just as the inner world of his later fiction reflects in its tortured patterns the strangler grip in which his mother and his own inability to love a woman held him.
The more than 100 stories and novelettes Woolrich sold to the pulps before the end of the thirties are richly varied in type and include quasi police procedurals, rapid-action whizbangs and encounters with the occult. But the best and best-known of them are the tales of pure edge-of-the-seat suspense, and even their titles reflect the bleakness and despair of their themes. I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes, Speak to Me of Death, All at Once, No Alice, Dusk to Dawn, Men Must Die, If I Should Die Before I Wake, The Living Lie Down with the Dead, Charlie Won’t Be Home Tonight, You’ll Never See Me Again—these and dozens of other Woolrich suspense stories evoke
with awesome power the desperation of those who walk the city’s darkened streets and the terror that lurks at noonday in commonplace settings. In his hands even such cliched storylines as the race to save the innocent man from the electric chair and the amnesiac hunting his lost self resonate with human anguish. 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. His most characteristic detective stories end with the discovery that no rational account of events is possible and his suspense stories tend to close not with the dissipation of terror but with its omnipresence.
In 1940 Woolrich joined the migration of pulp mystery writers from lurid-covered magazines to hardcover books and, beginning with The Bride Wore Black (1940), launched his so called Black Series of suspense novels—which appeared in France as part of the Serie Noire and led the French to acclaim him as a master of bleak poetic vision. Much of his reputation still rests on those novels and on the other suspense classics originally published under his pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley. Throughout the forties and fifties Woolrich’s publishers issued numerous hardcover and paperback collections of his short stories. Many of his novels and tales were adapted into movies, including such fine films noirs as Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man (1943), Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944), Roy William Neill’s Black Angel (1946), Maxwell Shane’s Fear in the Night (1947) and, most famous of all, Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Even more of Woolrich’s work was turned into radio and later into television drama. He made a great deal of money from his novels and stories but lived a Spartan and isolated life and never seemed to enjoy a moment of his time on earth. Seeing the world as he did, how could he?
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, at least during the thirties, is the Depression, and Woolrich has no peers when it comes to putting us inside the life of a frightened little guy in a tiny apartment with no money, no job, a hungry wife and children, and anxiety consuming 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 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. The police are rarely sympathetic, for they are the earthly counterparts of the malignant powers above and their main function is to torment the helpless.
All we can do about this nightmare world is to create, if we can, a few islands of love and trust to sustain us and help us forget. But love dies while the lovers go on living, and Woolrich is a master at portraying the corrosion of a relationship. Although he often wrote about the horrors both love and lovelessness can inspire, there are very few irredeemably evil characters in his stories. For if one loves or needs love, or is at the brink of destruction, Woolrich identifies with that person no matter how dark his or her dark side. Technically many of Woolrich’s novels and stories are awful, but like the playwrights of the Absurd, Woolrich often uses a senseless tale to hold the mirror to a senseless universe. Some of his tales indeed end quite happily— usually thanks to outlandish coincidence—but there are no series characters in his work and therefore the reader can never know in advance whether a particular Woolrich story will be light or dark, allegre or noir; whether a particular protagonist will end triumphant or dismembered. This is one of the reasons why so much of his work remains so hauntingly suspenseful.
Including Night Has A Thousand Eyes.
Of all Woolrich’s novels this is the one most completely dominated by death and fate, the one in which he pulls out all the stops to make the reader feel like an insect trapped in an inverted glass, the way he had experienced the human condition since early adolescence when he understood his own inevitable death. A simpleminded recluse with apparently uncanny powers predicts that millionaire Harlan Reid will die in three weeks, precisely at midnight, by the jaws of a lion, and the tension rises to unbearable pitch as the doomed man and his daughter Jean and the sympathetic young homicide detective Tom Shawn struggle to avert a destiny which they at first suspect and soon come to pray was conceived by a merely human power. Here is the kind of waking nightmare that lies at the heart of noir, and Woolrich makes us live the emotional torment and suspense of the situation until we are literally shivering in our seats.
The specifics of this novel may have been suggested to him by a long-forgotten B movie, On Probation (Peerless Pictures, 1935), which was directed by silent serial daredevil Charles Hutchison and starred Monte Blue, William Bakewell and Lucile Browne. Whether or not Woolrich happened to see this film, within a year of its release he used the mystic prediction of death at the lion’s jaws as the leitmotif of one of his most terrifying suspense novelettes, Speak to Me of Death (Argosy, February 1937; collected in The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich, 1981). Eight years after its magazine appearance the tale became the nucleus of Night Has A Thousand Eyes.
The novel was published in 1945, not as an entry in the Black Series under Woolrich’s own name nor as a William Irish title but with a byline composed of the author’s two middle names, George Hopley, and under the imprint of a publishing house (Rinehart) which had never handled him before. It seems to have been intended as a breakthrough novel, designed to introduce Woolrich to a larger audience, and was recognized early on as a major work even by those who didn’t recognize Woolrich as its author. Long and sometimes perceptive reviews appeared in several major publications. The pace never slackens, said James MacBride in the New York Times, from the superb cinematic opening … to the gelid pay-off.… Leave the night-light burning if you insist on finishing this one in bed.
Perhaps the novel was too intense, too suspenseful. Although Paramount Pictures bought movie rights almost as soon as the first copies hit the bookstores, the only reprint edition published in the United States during the 1940s was the Grosset & Dunlap hardcover reissue, timed to coincide with release of the film version in 1948. In the fifties it was reprinted only once (Dell pb #679, 1953), not as by Hopley but under the much better known William Irish byline. In the last full year of Woolrich’s life it came out again in softcover (Paperback Library pb #54-438, 1967), this time as by Woolrich himself. I predicted years ago that the then-most recent paperback (Ballantine pb #30667, 1983) would not be the last, and it’s a pleasure to be proved right.
The movie Night Has A Thousand Eyes (Paramount, 1948), was directed by John Farrow from a screenplay by Barre Lyndon and hardboiled mystery writer Jonathan Latimer. The film kept Woolrich’s title but had little connection with the novel and almost none of its power and terror. Edward G. Robinson starred as carnival mind-reader John Triton, the cinematic stand-in for Woolrich’s haunted prophet Jeremiah Tompkins, with Gail Russell as Jean Courtland (Jean Reid in the novel), John Lund as her boyfriend Elliott Carson (who doesn’t exist in the novel), and William Demarest as a skeptical and middleaged Lt. Shawn. The picture opens with a striking scene vaguely like the beginning of the novel as Russell, pursued by Lund, wanders in a trance through a railroad yard to a high bridge from which she feels compelled to leap to her death. Lund saves her and brings her back to the coffee shop where Robinson is waiting. In a flashback sequence that’s exceptionally long even for film noir, Robinson tells the young couple how years ago, while working as a phony vaudeville mind-reader, he suddenly found himself endowed with what he claims is true clairvoyant power—primarily the power to foresee deaths and disasters. He correctly predicted the death of Russell’s father in a plane crash and in due course he reveals his prevision that she will die at the feet of a lion at precisely 11:00 PM. The film then mutates into a standard whodunit padded with discussions about whether there’s a scientific basis for ESP. Finally Robinson convinces the police that his powers are r
eal, rushes to save Russell from an idiotic plot by one of her father’s business associates to kill her, and is mistakenly shot to death by the detectives who were her bodyguards. In his pocket the police find a note in which he predicted his own death that night.
What I hoped to establish, Jonathan Latimer said in an interview near the end of his life, was a real sense of terror that these things were coming true. This is precisely what Woolrich wanted too but that hope was frustrated by the film-makers’ radical alterations in the storyline, which left a silly and unsuspenseful plot that depended on several interlocked ridiculous contrivances. The film’s strong points are Farrow’s stylish direction and Robinson’s fine performance as a sort of Woolrich surrogate, a man whose gift has turned him into a half-crazed recluse obsessed by the inevitability of death. But one senses the hand of the devoutly Catholic Farrow in the climax where Robinson becomes a sort of Jesus figure, choosing to go to his own death so that his quasi-daughter might live. Less than a year after its release Farrow hosted a thirty-minute radio version of the movie on NBC’s Screen Directors’ Playhouse, with Robinson and Demarest reprising their movie roles, and in the summer of 1953 the Philip Morris Playhouse on Broadway offered a different thirty-minute radio adaptation of the movie with Peter Lorre in Robinson’s role.
Woolrich knew overwhelming financial and critical success but his life remained a wretched mess, and when his mother died in 1957 he cracked. From then until his own death eleven years later he lived alone, his last year spent in a wheelchair after the amputation of a gangrenous leg, thin as a rail, white as a ghost, wracked by diabetes and alcoholism and self-contempt. But the best of his final tales of love and despair are still gifted with the magic touch that chills the heart. He died of a stroke on September 25, 1968, leaving no survivors. Only a tiny handful of people attended his funeral. His estate was left in trust to Columbia University where his literary career had begun, to establish a scholarship fund for students of creative writing. The fund is named for Woolrich’s mother. He left behind four unfinished books—two novels, a collection of short stories and a fragmentary autobiography—plus a list of titles for stories he’d never even begun. In one of these he captured the essence of his world and the world of noir in just six words.
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