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A man convicted of his wife's murder must enlist a friend to help him find his only alibi witness, the woman he randomly picked up in a bar that night after a fight with his wife. Problem is, he never got her name and no one, starting with the bartender, remembers seeing her with him. The stakes in this race-against-time story are made plain at the starting gate: Chapter 1 is titled, "The Hundred and Fiftieth Day Before the Execution." Not made plain is Woolrich's willingness to fiddle with our perspective in order to preserve the mystery, nor the extent to which he will strain our credulity in solving it -- to say his plot is far-fetched is to assume that it is within throwing distance in the first place. But there are other reasons to read a Woolrich novel, even a pseudononymous one. His penchant for the bizarre, for one, most evident here in a vignette about a man being tortured simply by being looked at, constantly, hour after hour. Also his hard-driving prose, though that is muted somewhat for being too thinly spread. Turns out the friend isn't his only helper, he's got another woman on his side, as well, and a cop who isn't sorry he busted him but who has come to believe he's innocent just the same. The shifts back and forth between them break the tension. Made into a movie in 1944.
A man convicted of his wife's murder must enlist a friend to help him find his only alibi witness, the woman he randomly picked up in a bar that night after a fight with his wife. Problem is, he never got her name and no one, starting with the bartender, remembers seeing her with him. The stakes in this race-against-time story are made plain at the starting gate: Chapter 1 is titled, "The Hundred and Fiftieth Day Before the Execution." Not made plain is Woolrich's willingness to fiddle with our perspective in order to preserve the mystery, nor the extent to which he will strain our credulity in solving it -- to say his plot is far-fetched is to assume that it is within throwing distance in the first place. But there are other reasons to read a Woolrich novel, even a pseudononymous one. His penchant for the bizarre, for one, most evident here in a vignette about a man being tortured simply by being looked at, constantly, hour after hour. Also his hard-driving prose, though that is muted somewhat for being too thinly spread. Turns out the friend isn't his only helper, he's got another woman on his side, as well, and a cop who isn't sorry he busted him but who has come to believe he's innocent just the same. The shifts back and forth between them break the tension. Made into a movie in 1944.
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