Cornell Woolrich: The Inventor of Noir Fiction

It has been noted, with a great sense of authenticity, that Cornell Woolrich essentially created the genre of noir fiction in much the same way that Edgar Allan Poe created the detective novel. While Cornell Woolrich is not even close to being as famous as contemporaries such as Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain or Raymond Chandler, his influence has inarguably gone much deeper than any of the pulp writers of his age. Hard-boiled is an adjective freely tossed around to describe the works of these detective and mystery writers of the 30s and 40s and while it is especially fitting in the intensely ambiguous works of the second-best writer of this era, James M. Cain, it is a far better word to describe Woolrich's dark tapestry of femmes fatale and the saps who get involved with them, and even the good girls who come to sap's rescue. The greatest thing about Woolrich, and the aspect of literary accomplishment that really sets him apart from his peers, is that he generally tends to shy away from tidy, unambiguous conclusions. Unlike even the best work of James M. Cain, Woolrich's characters plots are not driven by the forces of good meeting the forces of evil. In a Woolrich story there are really no such things as good and evil, everything is made up of shades of noir, and the darkness into which the protagonist descends is generally the result of the dark forces of evil in the abstract.