Hard Case Crime has released Cornell Woolrich’s Fright, the title’s first publication in over fifty years. It’s not his best book, or even in the top ten, BUT it does have moments of that peculiar Woolrich magic. It’s set in 1915, and the historical novel, however recent, was not a good thing for Cornell, as it provides too much of a temptation to stop and explain about various things rather than just getting on with the plot. The basic premise, that a man believes he’s killed a woman and spends the rest of the book running and obsessing, is pretty creaky, but it does allow for many of his patented Poe-like explorations of the tormented mind on the edge of sanity. Not to get too psychological about it, but for all his rhapsodizing about female "angels" and the fairer sex, Woolrich is clearly terrified and guilt ridden about the physical act of sex itself, and seems to believe that delving just once into the pit of lust is enough to haunt and damn a man unto death. But it’s the prose that counts and Fright gives plenty of opportunity for him to strut his stuff (in some of the riper passages a little TOO much opportunity, alas). If Chandler, with his clipped, spare cadences and occasional bursts of poetry, was the Hemingway of noir, then Woolrich, with his undulating lyricism, is surely its Fitzgerald.

Here’s a few hot passages:

He saw her in the mirror, before he’s had time to turn. Then, having seen her there, her reflection seemed to hold him fast, like some hypnotic apparition, so that he was no longer able to turn. He kept looking at her that way, by indirection.

She peeled her cheek from the doorframe and came in a little further. A dainty, mincing step or two, like a dancer pointing a delicate toe before her, feeling her way in some delicate pas she is not yet sure she has mastered.

He hadn’t moved. He couldn’t.

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And now a new branch springs erect among the other branches, a branch that wasn’t there before. A branch without leaf, without sap, without bend. Black, and foundry-hard, and with a little round malignant mouth at the end, and its flowering will be death.

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"Spring three, one hundred," he said quietly above the glass-dimmed roar of the jazz band, worshiping her with his eyes there where she sat, lonely, lost, waiting to be claimed, across the room. A Madonna in an evening gown, his angel baffled with champagne. His hope of heaven, his religion…