A loner with so few friends he rarely put dedications on his novels and when he did, they were to his Remington Portable typewriter (The Bridge Wore Black) and to a hotel room he hated (Phantom Lady).
A furtive homosexual, he pocked his fiction with scathing descriptions of effeminate men. He allowed some acquaintances to call him Con an apt nickname, considering the sable of mystification he wrapped himself in. Woolrich was a shy-arrogant man who, on the few occasions when he went to a party, would rudely dismiss people who praised his work. But even if the weather had been balmy, and he had been alive and physically capable, the guest of honor wouldnt have showed up.
Some of his admirers threw a memorial tribute Friday, at the Mercantile Library of New York on East 47th Street, in the white rage of a Manhattan blizzard. His centenary was two weeks away.Ĭornell Woolrich died in 1968, but if he had put up with the world and vice versa for a few more decades, he would have turned 100 last Thursday. Not long ago, when I called the two most comprehensive mystery book stores in New York City, I learned that neither had his most important collections in stock. Though some of his books were best-sellers when first published, he has not been the subject of a passionate posthumous cult like hard-boiled writer Jim Thompson or s-f visionary Phillip K. Follow know him, if you know him, from the movies that Hitchcock and Truffaut and Fassbinder and others made from his novels and short stories.
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