I Married a Dead Man

Rating:
Summary: Father of noir
Review: Cornell Woolrich was the father of film noir and this book certainly reads like it. Think Barbara Stanwyck, who starred in the movie version. One of Woolrich's other stories eventually became REAR WINDOW.
The pacing in the novel is remarkable. At first it almost stops as the girl stands in front of a door and later listens to the dial tone as she tries to reach her lover who has left her pregnant and alone. But then it picks up as the girl heads west on a train, meets a newlywed and her new husband who show her compassion. The train crashes and somehow the two switch places and the girl is summoned back east where she becomes Patrice, the rich girl.
I was also impressed by Woolrich's pronoun usage. He refers to the girl as "she", although she does have a name, Helen. He begins several sentences in a row with the word "she", doesn't worry about varying his paragraph beginnings. Yet, this doesn't bother the reader a bit. Later on when she switches places with the rich girl, she becomes Patrice, so I imagine Woolrich is saying something about social class.
The setting, The Great Depression, adds a lot to the story. When she dials her lover, the girl asks the operator for her nickel back because it's the only money she has. Her former lover does leave her five dollars, along with railroad tickets, but when she boards the train, she's left with only seventeen cents, which she keeps throughout the novel.
I was bothered by the beginning which, in effect, told us how the novel would end. I imagine this was supposed to add suspense, but all it did for me was tell me Patrice and Bill would eventually hook up. Also, that despicable heal Georgesson giving Helen five dollars didn't quite ring true, and I was wondering why he would travel thousands of miles to identify Helen's body when he obviously couldn't care less what happened to her. I can only surmise that Woolrich needed Georgesson to give her the railroad tickets as a plot device (which should be hidden).
The ending will also rattle some cages as the reader must furnish her own. You'll read it over several times, I can guarantee you.

Rating:
Summary: An Intense Story of Deception and Murder - Woolrich Classic
Review: Cornell Woolrich, along with Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, was a key innovator in the development of the noir genre of crime fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. I Married a Dead Man is considered a classic of this uniquely American genre.

I am fairly new to Cornell Woolrich as I have only previously read one of his novels, the suspenseful The Bride Wore Black. Woolrich wrote a large number of suspense novels, apparently of uneven quality. His best stories are very good and include The Phantom Lady, I Married A Dead Man, and his 'Black' series (so-named from their titles).

The plot for I Married a Dead Man twists and turns in an unpredictable manner. The layered, complex ending is quite good. I was completely unfamiliar with the plot and was continually surprised. If you are new to this book, avoid reading the summary on the dust jacket or elsewhere. Ignorance may not be bliss, but too much knowledge may spoil some of the surprise.

But it won't hurt to think about the seemingly incongruous title. In my limited experience Cornell Woolrich selects his titles carefully. In retrospect, a simple title may suddenly have multiple meanings.

I Married a Dead Man may be best compared to an Alfred Hitchcock movie. And, as matter of interest, Woolrich was the author of Rear Window.

Rating:
Summary: Disturbing but a good read
Review: The backhanded praise offered by the reader from Kentucky misses the mark. Questions of Woolrich's ability to hide "illogical" events by a "believable [writing] fashion" are not suitable points to be weighed by one considering reading this book. On the whole the work concerns itself with the mundane. The protagonist is described, at length, moving through hackneyed chores that wouldn't interest her own mother for more than a page or two. But that all falls to the background of the larger picture the work creates. The woman's life, maybe "illogical"-turned-"believable," is nonetheless a portrait of inner torment. There is a languid paranoia that seeps through everything she does. She is ensconsed in a perfect situation for herself and her child, but she lives in perfect terror of that world crashing to pieces because of past conflicts that lurk unresolved. Woolrich, as always, manages to communicate this slow and intense inner death with subtle ease. This is a good book. It's not my favorite hard-boiled novel, but it's not a book deserving of such uncertain adjecives as believable, either. If you are a fan of the school then it is worth a look.

Rating:
Summary: One of the author's best
Review: This is the last novel of Woolrich's main period, before he hit a creative dry spell that lasted until his miserable lonely death of a stroke in 1968. It is also one of his least forgiving: depression, despairing, a look into the hopeless webs of fate that seem to ensnare us. Life, the protagonist tells us is a game -- one we and her are destined to lose. The third person story that falls in-between the first person prologue and epilogue is one of Woolrich's most imaginative and dark, albeit not always logical (Woolrich's work is suffused with logic holes that defy you to explain them, but you probably won't even notice them because the prose and suspense is no all-consuming). It's been adapted to film three times, but none have successfully recreated the true existential dread Woolrich's prose creates. (Riki Lake and existential dread . . . I don't think that works)

Very little of Woolrich is in print, and you really owe it to yourself to read one of the great works by the greatest suspense author of all time.

Rating:
Summary: One of the author's best
Review: This is the last novel of Woolrich's main period, before he hit a creative dry spell that lasted until his miserable lonely death of a stroke in 1968. It is also one of his least forgiving: depression, despairing, a look into the hopeless webs of fate that seem to ensnare us. Life, the protagonist tells us is a game -- one we and her are destined to lose. The third person story that falls in-between the first person prologue and epilogue is one of Woolrich's most imaginative and dark, albeit not always logical (Woolrich's work is suffused with logic holes that defy you to explain them, but you probably won't even notice them because the prose and suspense is no all-consuming). It's been adapted to film three times, but none have successfully recreated the true existential dread Woolrich's prose creates. (Riki Lake and existential dread . . . I don't think that works)

Very little of Woolrich is in print, and you really owe it to yourself to read one of the great works by the greatest suspense author of all time.