The Passing Tramp: Wandering through the mystery genre, book by book.
I finally decided to commit to doing a Cornell Woolrich biography and have a publisher. Just a small one so I don't know how much publicity we can get, but I will do my best. I have my title, I have my table of contents and I have written all of 400 words today! A start. Basically a page plus. But starting is the most important thing. I feel like I'm peculiarly qualified to do this biography and…
In the two decades between 1940 and 1960 Cornell Woolrich published 16 crime or weird novels, with the quality great tapering off, by common consensus, in the second decade. These are: The Bride Wore Black 1940 The Black Curtain 1941 Black Alibi 1942 Phantom Lady 1942 as William Irish The Black Angel 1943 The Black Path of Fear 1944 Deadline at Dawn 1944 as William Irish Night Has a Thousand Eyes…
" Ay, ay, ay, ay Canto y no llore s (Sing and don't cry)" --" Cielito Lindo ," Mexican folksong Cornell George Hopley Woolrich was born in New York City on December 4, 1903, eleven months after his parents Genaro and Claire wed on New Year's Day at the Episcopal Church of the Archangel in Harlem. In the type of foreboding calamity that occurred with alarming frequency in Cornell's books, just a…
For someone who spent over thirty-five years living in New York apartment hotels and increasingly not getting out much (in his last years he seldom ventured beyond the hotel lobby), Cornell Woolrich had a surprisingly cosmopolitan ancestry. His father Jorge Rodolfo Genaro Hopley Woolrich Sandoval was half-Mexican and half-Canadian; his mother Claire Attalie Tarler was, through her father's side,…
Silent as the Grave , publisher Centipede's latest edition of Cornell Woolrich short fiction, is available now. I wrote a substantial introduction for this volume and was able to get a few particular favorite stories in here, including " Dime a Dance " and " Two Fellows in a Furnished Room ." Another one I particularly love, " Mystery in Room 913 , "aka " The Room with Something Wrong ," was not…
What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor Early in the Morning Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor Early in the Morning -- " Drunken Sailor ," Trad. Sea Shanty Cornell on the left, Bill on the right The linchpin of Francis Nevin s' claim that Cornell Woolrich…
first American edition reprinted by Dell One thing I enjoy about Sara Woods is how she varied her London settings with more than occasional jaunts to Yorkshire, taking her brilliant barrister-sleuth Antony Maitland up north to her own native ground, where she was born in 1916 and after the Great War grew up into adulthood in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1967 in the detective novel And Shame the Devil ,…
Last month --incidentally Pride Month--crime fiction author and leading critic Martin Edwards found space on his blog to give two sentences of about 100 words over to a consideration of my essay collection Nothing Darker Than the Night , which was published nearly a year ago in 2025. Here's the full notice at Martin's blog: I'd also like to squeeze in a mention of another worthwhile Stark House…
The Book of Tobit is an apocryphal biblical text, still found, so I read, in Catholic Bibles but not Protestant ones, which tells the tale of Tobit, Tobit's son Tobias and Sarah. On a journey to recover ten silver talents owed to his family Tobias, guided by the archangel Raphael, meets Sarah, who as it happens is rather afflicted with a jealous demon, Asmodeus, in her life. This dreadful fellow,…
" Whoever likes [their] murders multitudinous will find them here....[There's a] plethoric flow of gore short [only] of Nazi warfare. " --"How the Blood Runs!" Review of Witch's Moon in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat , July 28, 1941 First American edition Two paperback editions followed, one with the title changed to, alliteratively but rather ridiculously, Blood on the Blonde Between 1939 and 1947…
Agatha Christie 's Hercule Poirot short story " Yellow Iris " was first published in The Strand in July 1937. Four months later, on November 2, 1937, " The Yellow Iris " appeared as a play on British radio. It too was written by Christie, who based the play on the prior published story. The story was first published in book form two years later in The Regatta Mystery , a middling collection of…
Very interesting, Gethryn! A pretty story! A little forced, perhaps, but who can help that nowadays with so many people writing these things [mysteries]." Damn it all, Gethryn, it makes about as much sense as Lewis Carroll." "Anthony! I've been thinking! Those things don't happen in England!" "Everything happens in England." "No. Not kidnapping." "It has. And it will again." "It American! It's…
American first edition The page-long authors' blurb on the back of the dust jacket of The Dark Wheel (1948), a suspense novel co-authored by Philip MacDonald and A. Boyd Correll , informs us that the two men " met over a game of chess " and " decided to continue their friendship over a good book ," adding: " This is the book. " The previous year in May 1947 Boyd Correll--his full name was Augustus…
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best....They're sending people that have lots of problems....They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." "I will build a great, great wall on our southern border." -GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, campaign launch speech, June 16, 2015 " Never seen a Mex that wouldn't sooner…
[Philip] MacDonald is at once a craftsman of writing, whose prose, characterization and evocation of mood (comic or terrible) might be envied by the most serious literary practitioner, and a craftsman of plot technique, whose construction and misdirection should delight (and startle) Carr or Christie. -- Anthony Boucher , NYTBR review of Macdonald's short fiction collection Something to Hide The…
William O'Farrell in his late thirties (!) How many crime writers publish their first novel when pushing forty? PD James was 42. Raymond Chandler had passed fifty. Dashiell Hammett was 35. So perhaps pushing forty isn't so exceptional. Life makes time-consuming exactions on one, to be sure, and sometimes creative ambitions don't gel into reality for many years. In any event, author William…
Two posts ago , you may recall, I discussed the matter of whether the bathtub corpse in Dorothy L. Sayers ' debut mystery, Whose Body? , had a circumcised or uncircumcised member. I concluded that it obviously was circumcised , though a certain, um, body of opinion over the decades has pronounced--errantly, it seems to me--otherwise. Where did this idea that the bathtub body was uncircumcised…
As the Passing Tramp blog achieved fifteen years of existence late last november, its views also starting shooting upward. In December there were around 140,000 views, in January 146,000, in February 135,000, in March 267,000 and in April 213,000 (month not quite over). A few days ago, the lifetime blog views surpassed five million. If the current views rate holds I will be adding 2-3 million…
Dorothy L. Sayers began writing Whose Body? , her first Lord Peter Wimsey detective novel, in London in January 1921, when she was was 27 years old. A letter that month from Sayers to her mother reveals that the novel rather changed in the writing. In the novel as published the naked body discovered in the bath belongs to a "semitic-looking stranger" who is at first thought might possibly be the…
"Would you care to marry the daughter of a vicious murderess?" "You are concerned with sensationalism, Mr. Strickland." --John Dickson Carr's Scandal at High Chimneys (1959) The crime writing of John Dickson Carr , like that of Queen of Crime Agatha Christie , clearly entered into a state of decline sometimes in the 1950s. Did Christie ever write a truly first-rate detective novel after 1953, the…
Whence did our prolific lad Philip MacDonald derive the pen name " Martin Porlock "? My theory: he got the name by combining two villages in far northeastern Devon, about twenty-five miles apart by Exmoor National Forest, Combe Martin and Porlock . One of the early crime fiction books MacDonald wrote with his father Ronald, The Spandau Quid , was said to show great familiarity with Devon. You can…
One more Philip MacDonald detective fiction review and then on to something else. This one's of The Wraith , the sixth Anthony Gethryn crime novel and the first of three which the author published in 1931. By the way, I now think this is the correct chronological bibliographical information on the Gethryn novels. The Rasp 1924 The White Crow 1928 The Noose 1930 The Link 1930 The Maze, in US…
Mystery writer Philip MacDonald completed the manuscript of Mystery at Friar's Pardon in August 1931 and in England it was published, under his new mystery writer pseudonym Martin Porlock , in October. The book was not published in the United States. Pardon was one of seven (!) novels published that year by MacDonald, the others being the Anthony Gethryn opuses The Wraith, The Choice and The Crime…
"Would you rid the world of a dangerous snake? Of course you would." "It's all so senseless! These things happening! Unreasonable! Good Lord, man, it's like a bad mixture of [MR] James and Edgar Wallace...." --cryptic and meta observations in Rope to Spare (1932), by Philip MacDonald American first (and to date only) edition Like Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote , Philip MacDonald 's super…
"I'm slaying in the rain...." 1944 Collins Canadian pb ed of Murder Gone Mad oddly suggesting it's set in Canada WHO IS THE BUTCHER? HOLMDALE PANIC STRICKEN IS OUR CITY TO BE ANOTHER DUSSELDORF? "You get along, Pike, and don't forget to show the world how that Dusseldorf business ought to have been handled." [I]n his postscript the Dusseldorf policeman admitted that the Holmdale Butcher had made…