Murder Always Gathers Momentum by Cornell Woolrich

Years ago Richard Paine had deferred half his wages to help his employer Ben Burroughs through hard times; but now,  after Burroughs has declared himself bankrupt and cancelled his company’s debts, he’s been left comfortably well-off, while Paine is unemployed and he and his wife face  eviction.  Paine decides it’s time to ask Burroughs for the money he owes and goes to visit him by night. Through a window he sees Burroughs opening a safe, and, not believing that the old man will honour the debt, he decides to rob him. Things go wrong and Paine is precipitated into a chain of events which lead to him escaping across the city, leaving a trail of corpses in his wake. 

This is not a favourite story of mine. This story of a frightened man in desperate times has an air of doomed inevitability about it from the start; almost from the first lines we know that no good is going to come out of Richard Paine’s night journey to Burroughs’ home.

As a portrayal of a man trapped in intolerable circumstances, it’s powerful stuff.  Francis M Nevins wrote in his book Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die:  “When it comes to putting us in the skin of a frightened little guy in a miserable little apartment with a hungry wife and children and no money and no job and fear of tomorrow eating him like a cancer, Woolrich has no peers. There is more of the anguish of the thirties in stories like Murder Always Gathers Momentum than in volumes of social history.”

True, and it’s interesting that the editor of Detective Fiction Weekly decided to publish this story in a time (December 1940) when its readers had not long emerged from the Great Depression and the world was slipping back into war, a time when most would surely have preferred to read more escapist stuff than being reminded they were themselves living in such desperate times.

As social comment the story is a valid document, while as fiction, criticizing Woolrich can be likened to throwing rocks at the moon. Let’s face it, we read Woolrich for his bleak worldview. But this one’s so remorselessly downbeat, and the final lines which reveal too late that the whole mess only began because Paine and his wife didn't communicate enough, left me with a flat and disappointed feeling. The problem wasn't the Great Depression, it was just a couple who should have talked more. And people say Americans don’t understand irony?

            
Below is a link to a free download of  the 27th October 1949 broadcast of  Woolrich's Momentum, an episode of Suspense scripted by E Jack Neuman and starring Victor Mature and Lurene Tuttle. Details differ from Woolrich's original story.

Woolrich's 'Momentum' broadcast in Suspense

The Night I Died by Cornell Woolrich (1936)

Detective Fiction Weekly
for August 8th 1936,
showing the story as an
anonymous publication

“The Point about me is that I should stay on the right side of the fence all those years, and then when I did go over, go over heart and soul like I did – all in the space of one night. In one hour, you might say.”

I’ve no idea how many noir stories pivot on the idea that a man’s life can change in an instant (usually for the worst), but I’d guess lots. Usually in these stories it’s the man’s life which changes; the woman is the one who’ll make the changes happen because she’s got into some mess, been kidnapped maybe, or is being blackmailed, so he has to rescue her or get her out of trouble. Or she’s a Machiavellian scheming bitch that any man with sense would run a mile from, but we just know he’s got such a bad case of the hots they’re going to end up swinging together.

There are some things that a man in a noir story should never do. He should never let his wife take out life insurance for him. And he should never never go home early to give her a surprise. You just know if he does that, the one in for the real surprise will be him.

So when Ben Cook goes home earlier than usual with a bag of toffees for Thelma, he probably deserves all he’ll get and, as he goes into the house, we’re not the least surprised that he hears voices.  Or that the voices are those of Thelma and a man he doesn't know. And the next thing he knows, he hears the two of them plotting his death.

With the advantage of surprise on his side, Ben takes control of the situation and Thelma’s scheme now undergoes some fundamental restructuring as Ben drops out of sight in order that the world will believe he’s dead and that that all-important insurance claim will be paid – initially, at least – to Thelma.

But we have a fair way to go before we’re at the end, and the path is likely to get a mite bloody.

This story was first published in Detective Fiction Weekly, August 8^th, 1936. Happily I've been able to locate the cover of that issue at The Fiction Mags Index. And look closely at that cover. Did he really publish this story anonymously?   I read the story in Four Novellas of Fear, 2010, A J Cornell. Publications.

Eyes That Watch You by Cornell Woolrich (1939)

Four Novellas of Fear by
Cornell Woolrich, 2010
A J Cornell Publications

Mrs Janet Miller is a contented woman. She has everything she needs. So long as she has the feel of the warm sun on her body, the blue sky overhead, and the voice of her son Vern Miller in her ears, she is content.

In fact she is entirely paralyzed and unable to speak or sign or do any thing at all without Vera or Vern’s assistance, but as long as she has those few things, she’ll ask for nothing more.

Woolrich with his own best
girl, his mum.

Then she learns that her daughter-in-law Vera is planning, with her lover Jimmy Haggard, to murder Vern. And there’s not a damn thing Janet can do to prevent it. She’s so helpless that when Vera realises her plan has been overheard, she doesn’t even worry about it. What can Janet do, anyway?

As I can't find the exact cover, this one
comes close, just four months before -
check the bottom left corner.

The murder is one of the most ghoulish that I've encountered in fiction, matching the burying-alive of Marty in the Cohen brothers Blood Simple. Vera plans to take advantage of a faulty bathroom water heater to gas Vern. She will escape the effects of the gas by wearing a gas mask. And just so that people won’t become suspicious at too many corpses turning up overnight, Jimmy Haggard has brought two masks, so Janet will also be protected whether she wants it or not.

At this point our synopsis has progressed about as far as it can without becoming a spoiler and the only additional detail that needs be mentioned is that our cast list isn't quite complete. We still need to meet a wandering young man with the unlikely name of Casement. And straight away you know this guy ain't what he appears to be…

This story was originally published in Dime Detective September 1939 as The Case of the Talking Eyes. I can’t find the relevant cover, though this one at least advertises another of Woolrich’s stories (another little research job to do, hm?) I actually read the story in the collection Four Novellas of Fear, published 2010 by A J Cornell Publications.

Death in the Air by Cornell Woolrich (1936)

Cornell Woolrich is a familiar name to followers of horror and hard-boiled detective thrillers alike. Black Alibi (1942) was filmed by the team of Producer Val Lewton and Director Jacques Tourneur as The Leopard Man (1943), while his gruesome short story Papa Benjamin was damn-near ruined when used for a segment of the portmanteau film Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (the story featuring Roy Castle).  

Death in the Air utilizes the unusual setting of New York’s elevated railway system - to great advantage. Inspector Stephen Lively – inevitably nicknamed ‘Step Lively’ – is on his way home from work on the ‘El’, a journey that carries him down major city streets, sixty feet in the air; then the track veers off into Greenwich Street, where the surroundings change dramatically:

“The old mangy tenements closed in on both sides, narrowing into a bottleneck and all but scraping the sides of the cars as they threaded through them. There was, at the most, a distance of three yards between the outer rail of the super-structure and their fourth-floor window-ledges, and where fire-escapes protruded only half that much.

            

“What saved them from incessant burglarising in this way was simply that there was nothing to burglarise. They were not worth going after. Four out of five were tenantless, windows either boarded up or broken glass cavities yawning at the night. Occasionally a dimly-lighted one floated by, so close it gave those on the train startling impression of being right in the same room with those whose privacy they were cutting across in this way.”

It’s during this part of the journey that the policeman notices two people engaged in a strange dance in one of these apartments, then a little further on realises that the man he’s sharing his compartment with is dead, killed by a bullet coming from outside.

‘Step Lively’s’ nickname is an ironic one, as he’s possibly the most languid policeman employed by the force. After pulling the communication cord, he realises that the journey back to the lighted apartment from which he suspects the bullet came, will involve a tedious journey, as he'll have to first descend to street level, then climb back up again. In the event he decides simply to walk back along the elevated track. 

The languid detective’s journey back along the busy railway line, then risking his neck clambering from the line to the open window – where he finds a woman’s corpse and needs to ‘rescue’ it from a blazing building while under the influence of a ‘crazy weed’ reefer that he’s unwittingly discovered in the room and started smoking, makes a riveting read.

Vintage Woolrich, first published in Detective Fiction Weekly in 1936. I found the story reprinted in Murder on the Railways edited by Peter Haining, Orion 1996