Women in Noir
Introduction to a three-volume collection of short fiction by Cornell Woolrich
Published by Renaissance Literary & Talent/Villa Romana Books, November 2021
Cornell Woolrich and women—a combination at once as fascinating as it is complex, in both his fiction and real life. On the surface, he was one of the foremost suspense writers of the 20th century, prolific in the crime, horror, noir and mystery genres. But a closer look reveals a deeply tortured soul, an alcoholic recluse drowned in self-loathing over his latent homosexuality. He had few romantic affairs with women, all of them meeting miserable ends. And always looming over him, forever defining his connection to the female, was his lifelong love-hate relationship with his mother, with whom he lived most of his adult years. Therefore it’s no surprise that Woolrich’s treatment of women in his writing was as layered as the man himself. Women in Noir seeks to shed light on those layers, bringing together a collection of 22 short stories that give us some of the most unique and dynamic female characters in the crime genre, many of whom haven’t been given life on the printed page for decades.
In his autobiography, Blues of a Lifetime, Woolrich admits that he “never loved women much.” One of the few nonfiction pieces he wrote, “Girls, We’re Wise to You,” even goes so far as to criticize the independent, free-spirited women of the Jazz Age while lamenting the lost qualities of a more old-fashioned girl. And yet, three of his most famous novels, The Black Angel (1943), Phantom Lady (1942) and The Bride Wore Black (1940), feature female leads that break the standard mold of women’s roles in noir fiction. While contemporaries like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler put their man’s man heroes front and center with women relegated to passive support, Woolrich found revolutionary ways to make his heroines the driving force of his novels, and not so predictably as femme fatales like James M. Cain’s Phyllis Nirdlinger (Double Indemnity, 1943).
Woolrich’s Black Angel wants to save her husband from being executed for a murder he didn’t commit, so she hunts down each of the men she believes might be responsible for the crime. In Phantom Lady, the fate of the male character, wrongly accused of the murder of his wife, is controlled by two women—the allusive phantom lady he met the night of the murder who can confirm his alibi, and his secretary who races against the clock to save him because she loves him. Here, the men are passive, trapped, while the women active, powerful. Both novels were adapted into films of the same name, classics in the film noir canon of the 1940s. But as one film scholar points out, these adaptations dial back Woolrich’s progressivism by changing the endings. The Black Angel goes back to being a subservient housewife, and Phantom Lady’s secretary needs rescuing by a man—neither of which occur in the source material. “The American film industry might not have been ready to display this kind of female empowerment on the big screen,” but Woolrich didn’t shy away.(1)
His most renowned and perhaps most female-forward work, The Bride Wore Black, wasn’t touched by Hollywood. It didn’t see adaptation until 1968, the year of Woolrich’s death, when French director Francois Truffaut was brave enough to take it on. In the novel, the titular bride enacts a brilliantly plotted revenge rampage against each of the men responsible for her husband’s untimely death on their wedding day. Truffaut’s La Mariée était en noir (1968) was the result, a powerful adaptation that didn’t shirk from the terrifying power the protagonist wields over her male victims.
Why then, when his noir contemporaries were focused on tales of the alpha male, did Woolrich dedicate so many pages in his novels and short stories to compelling, powerful female characters? He was a tormented, mysterious figure, so we might never have an answer, but in that fact lies a clue. Since childhood, he led an agonized life, experienced near constant anguish over everything from his parents’ divorce to his homosexuality, and perhaps that made him more human, more able to relate to those marginalized and maligned by society.
His parents divorced when he was just a boy. He never had a good relationship with his father, but lived with him in Mexico until adolescence when he started living with his mother in Manhattan. At age eighteen he met Irishwoman Veronica “Vera” Gaffney, with whom he fell head over heels. His esteem for Vera grew when, during one of their first dates, she rebuffed his physical advances—she was saving herself for marriage, and in that we might find the old-fashioned girl Woolrich laments in “Girls, We’re Wise to You.” But after months of courtship, Woolrich rebuffed her advances, and then she disappeared. Only later does he learn she spent months in jail for stealing a fur coat, and when he runs into her on her street some time later, she is (unwillingly, he thinks) pulled away by mysterious male figures in a black sedan. A chasm of loneliness and despair, a disillusionment with love and happiness had formed inside him that he never recovered from.
This was the first of three times he loved a woman, according to Blues of a Lifetime. The second he does not expound upon, except to say he wished he hadn’t let her marry someone else, so there’s some doubt by scholars as to whether the affair actually happened. The third time was Gloria Blackton, daughter of a famous film producer he met while he was in Hollywood in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He proposed to her out of the blue shortly after meeting her, and the marriage was disastrous. In an interview with Woolrich’s biographer Francis Nevins, Gloria’s sister Marian told him not only that it was never consummated, but that Gloria found a diary in which Woolrich recounted numerous homosexual encounters around Hollywood. Woolrich begged her to return it to him, which she did, though her father suggested she keep it for leverage. The marriage was soon annulled. Marian told Nevins that Gloria “wanted to mother everything”—it was in her nature, and so Nevins surmises that one of the reasons Woolrich married Gloria in the first place was because “he couldn’t live without a mother.”(2)
Claire Attalie Woolrich was a commanding figure throughout Woolrich’s life. He writes at length of his maternal grandfather in Blues of a Lifetime, whose house he grew up in with his mother and whom he revered, but he rarely mentions Claire herself. Everyone from college friends to colleagues knew that he was dominated by his mother, and many recall her not letting him leave the hotel room they shared. He moved into the Hotel Marseilles with her in 1933 after his failed screenwriting career in Hollywood. The Depression was in full swing by then, and he was as affected by it as anyone. It wasn’t until the 1940s when he started making serious money off of his work, and even then he stayed with Claire. He tried to move out once, he reports, but she compelled him back to her. Her health deteriorated at the end of the 40s, and he lived in even further isolation with her until her death in 1957. The loss “devastated him and liberated him at the same time,” according to Nevins, but he continued to live shut up in a hotel for 10 more years, wasting away, plagued by diabetes and alcoholism and, as always, his intense self-hatred.(3)
With so many successful novels, novellas and short stories, as well as numerous film deals, Woolrich was more than financially comfortable at the end of his life. But no amount of money or professional success could save him from his despair, and losing his mother only made him withdraw further into himself. In 1968, after ignoring a foot infection until it festered into gangrene, he had to have it amputated and died in the hospital not long after. A miserable life, loveless and dark, punctuated by a miserable end. The work he left behind reflects that darkness, but in it we can also find the light. Despite failed loves and an unhealthy relationship with his mother, Woolrich produced a surprising number of crime stories with interesting, strong, competent female leads, some even written from a woman’s first-person point of view. These women are active and vibrant in their own stories, whether they’re committing a crime, solving one, or the victim of one.
Volume 1 of Women in Noir showcases a line-up of some of Woolrich’s baddest broads. In Dangerous Dames you’ll find women no one should mess with, from demure wives with hidden lives to overt femme fatales. They are smooth and cunning. Most of all they are dangerous, and if they don’t seem so on the surface, something darker surely lurks beneath. Danger pulses through each of these seven stories, and Woolrich makes certain we know there is no escaping it, or the dames from which it comes.
Volume 2 brings you eight of the savviest gals in the Woolrich canon. Regular women solving crimes permeate the pages of Sleuths & Sages. Cops might not believe their hunches, but these intrepid women feel compelled to do what’s right. They take it upon themselves to bring justice for the less fortunate, whether that’s children, other women or loved ones. These brave, brilliant broads end up doing what men can’t, or won’t—go undercover, act as bait, and set elaborate traps to catch the bad guys.
Volume 3 drips with love and pain, two sides of the same coin for Woolrich. The protagonists in Lover’s Lament are tangled up with their lovers for better or worse, allied or opposed. Each of these stories explores a relationship and the position the female leads are put in, by choice or otherwise, in contrast to their male counterparts when crime or the treacherous hand of fate are involved. Nothing is ever sunshine and roses with Woolrich, and these seven dark tales are no exception.
1. Thompson-Tremblay, Éloïse. “Subverting gender – Cornell Woolrich and the women of film noir.” Offscreen: vol. 22, issue 2, February 2018. https://offscreen.com/view/subverting-gender-cornell-woolrich-and-the-women-of-film-noir
2. Nevins Jr., Francis M. Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die. The Mysterious Press, 1988.
3. Ibid.
