Weekly Standard (2004) - Dark Deeds
Details
- book review: Dark Deeds
- author(s): Jon L. Breen
- journal: Weekly Standard (08/Mar/2004)
- issue: volume 9, issue 25, page 31
- journal ISSN: 1083-3013
- publisher: Weekly Standard
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Anthologies, Bernard Herrmann, Cornell Woolrich, Daphne du Maurier, Ethel Lina White, Francis M. Nevins, Jr., François Truffaut, Grace Kelly, James Stewart, New York City, New York, North by Northwest (1959), Patricia Highsmith, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, Rear Window (1954), Short stories, Suspicion - Four O'Clock, The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Links
Abstract
Breen discusses Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich and edited by Francis Nevins.
Article
Dark Deeds The Mystery of Cornell Woolrich Night and Fear A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich Carroll & Graf, 272 pp., $26
When I was twelve years old, I discovered Cornell Woolrich's "After–Dinner Story" in an old issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and Woolrich immediately joined the group of writers–Fredric Brown, Ray Bradbury, and Charles Beaumont were others–who so delighted my pre–adolescent heart that I have stockpiled and retained their books through all the years since. Approaching "After–Dinner Story" decades later, for the centennial last month of Woolrich's birth, I wondered if the story, originally in a 1938 issue of the classic pulp magazine Black Mask, would retain its initial impact.
It did, and it didn't. The elements that most gripped me at twelve were undoubtedly the action, the suspense, and the intriguing plot. An elevator in a Manhattan high–rise malfunctions and plunges to the ground, killing the operator and leaving the passengers in darkness. Some are injured, others not; some panic, while others keep their heads. After the rescue, it is discovered that one passenger was shot to death in the blackout, and the police conclude it had to be suicide. The father of the victim, certain it was murder, invites the survivors to a bizarre dinner party, telling them he knows who the murderer is; that he has poisoned that person's dinner; and that the covered dish brought last to the table contains the antidote, r...
