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synopsis

Haunted by the grim specters of “mass poverty, violent extremism and world war,” the decade of the 1930s has justly been dubbed the “age of anxiety.” And if this anxious age had its own agitated bard, surely it was crime writer Cornell Woolrich. During the depressed Thirties and into the desperate, war-torn Forties, the agoraphobic and anemic Woolrich, from his socially isolated New York apartment, channeled his own relentlessly creeping anxieties into a torrent of unforgettable crime fiction, both in its longer and shorter forms. Silent As The Grave, the latest volume of Woolrich’s short pulp crime writing, collects fourteen grimly gripping tales, along with the author’s evocative autobiographical essay “Even God Felt the Depression.”
       You will find your own anxiety steadily mounting as you read such grave crime tales as “Dime A Dance,” a.k.a. “The Dancing Detective,” where a mad serial killer is determined to keep a date for a deadly danse macabre with a taxi dancer trying to discover the identity of her friend’s slayer; “Two Fellows in a Furnished Room,” where the fast friendship of two roommates is tested by the feral murder of a woman; “You’ll Never See Me Again,” where a young bride tearfully vows to go “home to mother” and promptly vanishes without a trace; “Murder at the Automat,” where a man is mysteriously dispatched at an automated restaurant by means of a poisoned bologna sandwich; “Bequest,” where a desperate guy on the lam finds to his horror that bad as things are, they can always get worse; “Collared,” where a mauled moll plots her resourceful revenge; “Fountain Pen,” where some crooks learn that the pen is much deadlier than the sword; and “Silent As the Grave,” where a loyal wife’s vow of silence to her husband is undermined by a nagging conscience that just won’t keep quiet.
       These and six more tales of murder, madness, and malevolence are sure to rattle readers’ raw nerves and have them nervously reaching for the lamp light as night falls in folds around them.