The Bride Wore Black

by Cornell Woolrich, Eddie Muller (Introduction)

Overview

A police detective seeks the rationale between seemingly-unrelated murders, connected only by the appearance of a beautiful woman each time

When the wealthy ladies’ man fell from his balcony in the midst of his engagement party, the police dismissed the death as the result of a freak accident. There was nothing to connect it with the poisoning of a lonely man in his squalid apartment, or with the married business-man killed after him, sealed into a closet and left to suffocate. No connection, that is, aside from the appearance of a beautiful woman in each case, just before the victims met their untimely ends.

Nobody knows her identity, where she comes from or whither she goes. Nor do they know why anyone would be targeting this series of seemingly-unrelated persons. But one police detective is convinced that the answers to these questions can save the lives of men who might be next on the list, men who will continue to die at a rapid rate unless he can solve the puzzle and intervene.

Cornell Woolrich’s first crime novel, The Bride Wore Black is the stylish, tense thriller that launched the career of “the supreme master of suspense” (New York Times). It was filmed by Francois Truffaut under the same title, and went on to inspire Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613162002
Publisher:	Penzler Publishers
Publication date:	01/05/2021
Series:	An American Mystery Classic
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	216,549
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Born George Hopley-Woolrich, Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968) is the pen name most often employed by one of America’s best crime and noir writers, whose other pseudonyms included George Hopley and William Irish, the moniker under which Waltz into Darkness was first published. His novels were among the first to employ the atmosphere, outlook, and impending sense of doom that came to be characterized as noir, and inspired some of the most famous films of the period, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Francois Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, The Phantom Lady, and celebrated B-movies such as The Leopard Man and Black Angel.

Eddie Muller, "The Czar of Noir," is the founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation, and provides commentary for noir films and specials on Turner Classic Movies. He created his own graphics firm, St. Francis Studio, and is the author of Grindhouse, Dark City Dames, and Dark City. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Editorial Reviews

11/16/2020

At the start of this somber crime novel from Woolrich (1903–1968), originally published in 1940, a woman named Julie buys a one-way ticket to Chicago at New York’s Grand Central Station, but she gets off at the first stop, still in Manhattan. After renting a room under an assumed name, she cases the apartment house of well-to-do Ken Bliss, whose engagement party she later crashes. Out on the apartment’s terrace, Julie tells Bliss that, though he doesn’t recognize her, he’d seen her once before, when he was in a car with four other men. Then she pushes him off the terrace to his death and disappears, leaving the police baffled as to her identity and motive. Julie dispatches a second man by poisoning and manages to stay one step ahead of the law as she murders other victims. The ending, with its devastating revelation of what’s behind the homicides, is as bleak as anything Woolrich ever wrote. Kudos to the American Mystery Classics series for making this top-notch noir available to a new audience. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"The Bride Wore Black is a delightfully dark pioneer noir novel from 1940 that still feels innovative and keeps readers off-balance without being off-putting."

Shelf Awareness

"Of all the authors whose forte was turning our spines to columns of ice, the supreme master of the art, the Hitchcock of the written word, was Cornell Woolrich."

Believer Magazine

"The writing of Cornell Woolrich goes through you like a shriek in the night."

Dorothy Salisbury Davis

2020-11-27
The founding novel by the founding father of American noir returns to print.

Woolrich (1903-1968) kicked off his Black series with this dark 1940 fantasy about a woman who targets five men for death for reasons that would be teasingly obscure if it weren’t for the title. Following the rule that “the really clever woman is all things to all men. Like the chameleon, she takes her coloring from his ideal of her,” Julie Killeen studies each of her targets at her leisure, discovers what they’re looking for in a woman, and then assumes that role. She crosses the path of man-about-town Ken Bliss just long enough to kill him. For the marginal recluse Mitchell, she poses as the partner in an impossible romance. Luring his wife away from home, she turns up on Frank Moran’s doorstep as his son’s solicitous kindergarten teacher. After posing as an irresistible model for the painter Ferguson, she sets her eye on her final target, the popular writer Holmes. Detective Lew Wanger has his suspicions about the murders even though the women who committed them seem to have little in common. Will he catch up with Julie before she finishes her work? After ratcheting up the tension bit by unnerving bit, Woolrich ends his tale with an ironic postmortem that casts Julie’s labors in an even darker light. The pattern behind her crimes is so stark, simple, and compelling that Woolrich couldn’t resist reprising it in Rendezvous in Black (1948), which readers may want to seek out if they’re still able to sleep after gulping this nightmare down.

A point-by-point inversion of romantic idealism that’s still memorably disturbing 80 years on.

Kirkus Reviews