Man of Smoke

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On September 25, 1968, Cornell Woolrich was found dead in his room at the Sheraton-Russell on Park Avenue. He was in a wheelchair and weighed 89 pounds; after years of depression, he had let a minor foot injury turn into gangrene and had to have the leg amputated. Cornell Woolrich, the innovative author of tales of psychological horror and suspense, whose work had been adapted into such films as Rear Window and The Bride Wore Black, was snuffed out at sixty-four years old. Five people attended the funeral. It was a sad end befitting one of his own stories.

Chase Manhattan Bank, which had been made executor and trustee under his will, hired Frances M. Nevins, a young expert in estate and copyright law, as a consultant to the Woolrich estate. Two major tasks were at hand. First, Woolrich had bequested to his alma mater Columbia University a $750,000 journalism fellowship in his mother’s name. Second, the university received all of Woolrich’s personal papers from his forty-year career. Nevins arrived at Columbia on a snowy afternoon to assess the holdings — the primary sources needed for a masterful biography.

He was brought three boxes.

They contained 1.5 linear feet of material.

He completed his entire review that afternoon.

By contrast, the crime author Patricia Highsmith deposited over 120 boxes of documents at the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern: notebooks, letters, and diaries detailing her rotten childhood and successful career, drafts of The Talented Mr. Ripley and other novels, plays, short stories, and more. Highsmith’s archive has fed three major biographical works, and more needs to be done.

Woolrich left Nevins a fistful of bad checks from publishers and little else.1

Yet there was hope. One box contained an unfinished draft of his autobiography, Blues of a Lifetime, which no one else had ever read. “Everyone in life can make a claim of one thing, one good point,” Woolrich wrote in the opening chapter. “Everyone has one. And I can claim credit for at least one thing — self-honesty. I’ve never lied a day in all my life, not to anyone else and not to myself. And that is why, though these pages may be boring, though these pages are fatuous and unremarkable, these pages will at least be truthful.”2 However, after reading the hundred or so pages of text, Nevins called the dead man’s bluff. Blues of a Lifetime offered valuable data, but this data was embedded in a web of exaggerations, distortions, and lies — as untrustworthy as Woolrich’s amoral characters. Even now, Woolrich’s archival finding aid warns researchers that “there is very little information about his personal life, and the information that exists may or may not be true.” Woolrich was so elusive Nevins called him the “man of smoke.” With this dearth of material, could a biography of any real value be written?

At that time, the most detailed biographical sketch of Woolrich was by the esteemed mystery writer and publisher Ellery Queen, in a 1965 collection of his work. It established a narrative thread of Woolrich’s existence using the Library of Congress, slivers of personal details, and anecdotes from Woolrich and his peers. But “what do we know of the man inside?” Queen asked. “By any name, Cornell Woolrich is retiring almost to the point of being a recluse. When we add up all we know, we know very little, and Woolrich is reluctant to reveal his inner self. He once described his work as a form of subconscious self-expression ‘… I don’t bother to find what causes it.’”3

Nevins would. He hunted down all external evidence of Woolrich’s existence in the public world and compiled a dossier on everyone who had anything to do with Woolrich, thereby uncovering more material than Queen.

Woolrich was the son of a miner and traveled throughout South America and Europe as a child. After his parents divorced, he was raised by his mother, whose influence on him was powerful if not domineering. Historian Jacques Barzun recalled sitting beside the “very shy . . . very retiring, very suspicious” writer through two courses at Columbia. Woolrich was visibly friendless but shared his sarcastic sense of humor with Barzun when he wasn’t tending to his ill mother.4 The success of his first novel Cover Charge (1926) convinced Woolrich to ditch school as he was about to become the next F. Scott Fitzgerald. Riding high on success he headed to LA, seduced the daughter of a Hollywood studio executive, and tried to make as a screenwriter.

The rest of his life was marked by desire, danger, and bouts of self-hatred and cruelty. Woolrich struggled his whole life with his attraction to men; when clues of his affairs with men were discovered, his marriage was annulled. The Depression shrank the audience for tales of the rich and beautiful, and Woolrich’s publishers abandoned him. He returned to New York to live with his mother. Considered a failure by his publishers and himself, Woolrich recreated his authorial presence in the pages of Black Mask and other crime magazines. His manic output of work made him one of the most recognized names in pulp fiction, alongside Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. But he continually alienated those close to him; he would talk eloquently about literature with his friends only to become unbearable, especially after a drink. His mother’s death foretold his own and his career’s, as Woolrich retreated into indifference and isolation.

Nevins had sketched a sad life of a difficult, talented artist. But these facts were not enough to support a full-length biography. And here many historians might have abandoned the project, crying “Not Enough Primary!”

But Nevins chose a creative route. He turned to a set of primary sources that Woolrich could not erase from existence: his twenty-six novels and more than 200 short stories and novellas. Nevins chased every scrap of work, every reprint, every republished or “repackaged” story, under every pen name, to retrace the development and destruction of one of crime fiction’s great practitioners. Works of art are the primary sources of the imagination, experiential documents of the life, mind, and feelings of the creator. They are subjective and open to a variety of interpretations, of course, but are no less valuable. “In his fiction,” the critic Richard Corliss noted, “the mystery man wrote his own autobiography, one page at a time.”5 Nevins had the gall to read every page, and then produced a unique and authoritative biography.

Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die reveals the landscape of passion, hatred, and fatalism that ran amok through Woolrich’s heart and mind — a nightmare world of vicarious pleasure found in violence, sex, and cruelty, where virtue is frail and surrounded by menace, where love can only end in terror and despair. His most famous story, “It Had to Be Murder,” was a voyeuristic fetish tale of being the unseen eye of life. The protagonist is the “perfect Woolrich cipher,” a man confined to his room with a broken leg, no interest, no joys, who begins spying on his neighbors through the long dark night. Their secret lives are lain naked before his creeping eye, and soon, as their patterns become routine, their lives seem as paralyzed and empty as his own — until the ailing wife of a somber man seems to just … vanish. When the police see no foul play, our hero is driven to find a more sinister truth. After all, who knows these strangers than their peeping Tom? This interior world echoes the loneliness that defined Woolrich’s life — observing an outside world he could not truly be invested in, and then recast into a reality where he was the ultimate authority. A fitting power fantasy for a recluse, which earned him $225.

 And that is just one of the stories that Nevins unpacks. His 600-plus-page biography maps out Woolrich’s fears and cravings for human connection, his distrust of humanity’s supposedly good intentions, his fascination with authenticity. All of which would have made Woolrich furious. Because despite Woolrich’s best efforts to vanish from human record, Nevins unveiled his inner world by analyzing his entire body of work. As Nevins recently said: “I was trying to write the life of a man who had no life. What other options did I have?”6

When you receive the equivalent of “three boxes of bad checks and a lying memoir” for a project, ask: should I scream “Not Enough Primary” and abandon all hope? Or, is the limitation a key to a more innovative and no-less-valuable work? Take some time to consider all the options, even those outside the norms of your field. Where others saw nothing, you may find and catch your own “man of smoke.”


  1. Francis M. Nevins Jr., Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die (New York: Mysterious Press, 1988); Patricia Highsmith Papers finding aid, Swiss Literary Archives.
  2. Blues of a Lifetime: Autobiography of Cornell Woolrich, ed. Mark T. Bassett (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State Universty Popular Press, 1991), 5.
  3. Ellery Queen, “Introduction,” The 10 Faces of Cornell Woolrich: An Inner Sanctum Collection of Novelettes and Short Stories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), 9–14.
  4. Nevins, Cornell Woolrich, 18 (quotation), 32–33.
  5. Richard Corliss, “That Old Feeling: Woolrich’s World,” Time, Dec. 08, 2003.
  6. Interview with Francis Nevins, Dec. 5, 2020. Nevins continues to add to Woolrich’s biography as new evidence becomes available. See, for his example, his introduction to “Dark Oblivion,” a newly discovered Woolrich story, in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (Jan./Feb. 2021). Also see his discussion with Ann Douglas at the Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival, Columbia University School of the Arts, in 2019.
Jason Ridler teaches history and creative writing to such clients as Google, Johns Hopkins University, and several educational non-profits. He is the author of "Maestro of Science" (University of Toronto Press) and "Mavericks of War" (Stackpole).

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