Rear Window and Other Murderous Tales
Introduction to a collection of short fiction by Cornell Woolrich
Published by Renaissance Literary & Talent/Villa Romana Books, June 2022
Murder. It’s one of the most unspeakable acts a human can commit. And yet, we are fascinated by it. What motivates a person to kill another? Was it premeditated, or committed in a fit of rage? What happens after such a gruesome crime? Did the murderer flee the scene? Was the carnage covered up, the body hidden, or was it left in plain sight for some innocent soul to stumble upon? And what about the human element? How is a community affected? How do loved ones cope with the trauma? These questions have inspired storytellers for millennia. Today, they spur endless media content: novels, true crime, films, television series, podcasts. But few have treated the topic with the haunting psychological nuance of Cornell Woolrich.
One of the foremost crime and suspense fiction writers of the 20th century, Woolrich takes his readers deep into the disturbed minds of murderers, evoking the roiling rage, anxiety and fear that go hand in hand with the crime and its aftermath. Some of his best writing explores the stories of those surrounding the crime: detectives, witnesses, amateur sleuths, the falsely accused, the bereaved. The Bride Wore Black, published in 1940 as the first of his classic Black Series of suspense novels, and perhaps his most revered work, made an enormous splash in the genre. When a woman’s fiancé is killed on their wedding day, she embarks on a brutal revenge spree, hunting down and killing each man responsible, sending police scrambling to solve the murders before she strikes again. Woolrich’s masterstroke is in getting the reader to sympathize with, even root for, the vengeful bride in her murderous pursuits.
In his short stories, of which there are over 200, Woolrich demonstrates his range, giving readers a 360-degree view into this most gruesome human crime. Rear Window and Other Murderous Tales collects nine of his best, and seeks to showcase how a master of the crime and suspense genres deals with the psychology of murder from a variety of different perspectives. Whether committing the act, fleeing from it, reeling from it, or investigating it, murder is the unspeakable crime that drives the characters in these nine stories to desperate ends. Many of these tales take place during the Great Depression. As Woolrich surely witnessed, the economic struggles of that era only exacerbated people’s worst impulses. In these pages, Woolrich uses it to exacerbate the worst human impulse of all.
The centerpiece of this collection, and its most famous story, is “Rear Window.” Woolrich submitted the story to his editor under the title “Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint,” which certainly suggests the cloistered voyeurism of the tale. However, Dime Detective published it in February 1942 under the title “It Had to be Murder,” a much snappier, and perhaps more fitting, title for a pulp magazine. It was only two years later that the story took on its famous “Rear Window” moniker when it appeared under that name in the 1944 fiction collection After-Dinner Story, and that’s the name that stuck.
Once the story was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock into the classic 1954 film starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, it became forever inseparable from that name. The film is a marvelous adaptation of the source material. Woolrich’s story is wonderfully sparse and claustrophobic, much of the suspense coming from the turmoil inside our protagonist’s head. Jeffries is a man alone, a “blank slate,” as Francis Nevins, Woolrich’s biographer, puts it.(1) The reader is not meant to know of his job, interests or relationships, only that he is immobile in his apartment and suspects his neighbor across the courtyard of murdering his wife. And that’s the magic of it. In a feature length film, however, Hitchcock has more room to play, so he gives Jeffries a fuller, richer life. In the film, the character is a storied reporter/photographer, and thus, a professional observer. He has a girlfriend, Lisa, played by Grace Kelly, and a nurse, Stella, played by Thelma Ritter. Through Jeffries’ on-screen interactions with these women, Hitchcock masterfully externalizes the internal conflict Jeffries suffers in Woolrich’s original pages. Lisa and Stella are willing participants in Jeffries’ paranoia and investigation, talking through the possible motives and mechanics of the murder with him. They take active roles in uncovering clues while Jeffries is relegated to passive spectator. Best of all, Hitchcock’s characters wrestle with the ethics of their voyeurism, and in turn, so must the viewer.
But in translating the story to the screen, a few of its best elements are inevitably lost. Woolrich’s story is not just claustrophobic because Jeffries’ physical situation is claustrophobic, but because the reader only experiences the events of the plot within his obsessive mind. Jeffries is bound to his wheelchair, and we are bound to his thoughts. While he tries to determine whether, and how, his neighbor Lars Thorwald murdered his wife, we are left to determine whether he is right, or if we’re reading the paranoid ravings of a madman. This “did he or didn’t he” question is what Francis Nevins calls the “oscillation story,” a trope Woolrich uses in infinite permutations throughout his writing.(2)
Most fascinating is what Jeffries calls “delayed action.” As he peers into the windows of Thorwald’s apartment, he senses something amiss about it, something wrong with the space itself, and this ‘something wrong’ spells murder. As the title suggests, it had to be murder. This amorphous suspicion plagues him constantly, but he can’t quite put his finger on it:
For two days a sort of formless uneasiness, a disembodied suspicion…had been flitting and volplaning around in my mind, like an insect looking for a landing place. More than once, just as it had been ready to settle, some slight thing, some slight reassuring thing, such as the raising of the shades after they had been down unnaturally long, had been enough to keep it winging aimlessly, prevent it from staying still long enough for me to recognize it.
As he explains, “the rational part of [his] mind was far behind the instinctive, subconscious part.” It’s his instincts that tell him foul play is afoot, the tortured instincts we as the reader are trapped within, until his rational mind can catch up and provide tangible proof. Once his rational mind does catch up, however, the answers to his suspicions come together in the most satisfying of ways. Though the story’s general plot ends in much the same way as the film, the details of the murder itself, and specifically its aftermath as it relates to Jeffries’ “delayed action,” are quite different in the story, and unsettling enough that any Hitchcock aficionado can appreciate the singularity of the original text.
One of the only other characters in Woolrich’s story is Sam, Jeffries’ “houseman,” who comes each day to help the immobile protagonist with cooking and cleaning. While his race is never explicitly specified, Woolrich’s biographer Francis Nevins assumes him to be Black, most likely based on his dialogue. Sam and Jeffries share a friendly, familiar rapport. They even spent time “bumming around on that cabin-cruiser” some time ago, implying an established relationship. But Hitchcock eliminates Sam from his adaptation entirely. It is Sam who bravely embarks on many of the actions given to Lisa in the film, such as sneaking into Thorwald’s apartment. Nevins posits that Sam and Jeffries’ exchanges are “on a level of genuine equality like no other interaction between people of different races in the entire Woolrich canon.” How film audiences in 1954 might have received such an interaction on screen is, sadly, another story.(3)
Another rift between story and film occurred not on the page or screen, but in the United States Supreme Court. Though the 1990 case Stewart v. Abend may be little known to fans of both Hitchcock and Woolrich, the effects swept violently through the literary and entertainment industries. According to the Copyright Act of 1909, a work, such as a short story or book, was given two terms of copyright protection: one for 28 years and, following a copyright renewal, another term of 28 years. Woolrich died in 1968, two years before he could have renewed the copyright on the story. He left his estate to a trust at Columbia University via Chase Manhattan Bank, who renewed the copyright to the story in 1969. Chase later transferred their renewal rights to Sheldon Abend, a literary agent.
When Rear Window was broadcast on ABC television in 1971, during this “renewal term,” Abend sued the owners of the film, Hitchcock and star James Stewart. Though Hitchcock and Stewart had purchased the motion picture rights to the story from Woolrich in 1953 during the original copyright term, Abend argued that the broadcast, which went ahead without Abend’s permission during the renewal term, thus infringed on his copyright. The case worked its way through circuit and appeals courts, eventually reaching the Supreme Court, where it was decided in Abend’s favor: because the film was broadcast during the renewal term, and because Hitchcock and Stewart did not get permission from Abend to use the underlying work, they did in fact infringe upon Abend’s copyright.(4)
This sent shock waves through the entertainment industry. Many films and television shows based upon books or short stories had been produced during those works’ original copyright terms. Owners of the films and shows suddenly found that they no longer owned the film or television rights to their own productions if the books or stories those productions were based upon were now in their renewal term. Chaos ensued. Vast sums of money were paid by studios and production companies to the owners of the underlying works so they could continue broadcasting their own productions. The copyright law eventually changed, and any underlying work published after 1978 enjoyed copyright protection for the duration of the author’s life plus fifty years. The law changed again with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended copyright protection for the life of the author plus seventy years. Woolrich could never have known the impact his story would have on the very foundations of the literary and entertainment worlds.
“Rear Window” went on to helm a classic collection published first by Ballantine Books in 1984, Rear Window and Four Short Novels, and then by Penguin in 1994, Rear Window and Other Stories, alongside four other acclaimed Woolrich stories. It appeared in Penguin’s The Cornell Woolrich Omnibus in 1998, and Centipede Press’ 2012 deluxe hardcover collection Speak to Me of Death, but all of these versions have gone out of print. For the first time since these releases, “Rear Window” starts readers on a chilling literary journey of murder and mayhem within this brand new collection. The additional eight stories collected here have been unfairly neglected, gathering dust for decades, or completely forgotten since their original magazine or collection publications almost a century ago.
We’d like to extend a special thank you to Francis Nevins, Cornell Woolrich’s official biographer, without whom much of the information about this mysterious writer’s life and work would be lost to history.
Nevins Jr., Francis M. Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die. The Mysterious Press, 1988.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Diliberto, Michael R. Looking through the Rear Window: A Review of the United States Supreme Court Decision in Stewart v. Abend. 12 Loy. L.A. Ent. L. Rev. 299, 1992.
