|
15b4e54
|
That was enough dialogue for a few pages - he had to get into some fast, red-hot action.
|
|
writing
fiction-writing
pulp-fiction
pulp
writers
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
df47493
|
When I came out into the outside room again, I saw her shoe still lying there, where it had come off in the course of our brief wrestle. It looked so pathetic there by itself without an owner, it looked so lonely, it looked so empty. Something made me pick it up arid take it in to her. Like when someone's going away, you help them on with their coat, or their jackboots, or whatever it is they need for going away. I didn't try to put it back..
|
|
heaven
death
after-death
after-life
afterlife
limbo
twentieth-century
dying
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
06c7bfc
|
I rang the bell and she opened the door, dried her hands, and said heartily: 'Hello, stranger. I was just saying to Cliff only tonight, it's about time you showed up around here.' I wanted to detach him from her, but first I had to sit through about ten minutes of her. She was my sister, but you don't tell women things like I wanted to tell him. I don't know why, but you don't. You tell them the things you have under control; the things t..
|
|
men
women
fear
men-and-women
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
fde42af
|
There's a catch phrase that you all must have heard at one time or another. You walk into a room or go over toward a group. Someone turns and says with huge emphasis: 'There he is.' As though you were the most important one of all. (And you're not.) As though you were the one they were just talking about. (And they weren't.) As though you were the only one that mattered. (And you're not.) It's a nice little tribute, and it don't cost anyone..
|
|
tribute
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
8a06c1f
|
Just inside the doorway he puts down the bags, motions her to stand by them a minute. He saunters out ahead, carefully casual. Peers up one way, down the other. Nothing. The street's dead to the world. Then suddenly, from nowhere, ping! Something flicks off the wall just behind him, flops at his feet like a dead bug. He doesn't bend down to look closer, he can tell what kind of a bug it is all right. He's seen that kind of bug before, plent..
|
|
shots
sniper
noir
guns
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
f27ea08
|
Louisville, an hour after dark, is a carpet of gilt thumbtacks below them, with straight, twinkling lines like strings of beads leading out from it. Southeastward now, toward the Tennessee state-line. ("Jane Brown's Body")" --
|
|
lousiville
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
8e8a9e8
|
A second red-orange spearhead leaps straight at O'Shaughnessy. The whole world seems to stand still. Then the gun behind it crashes, and there's a cataclysm of pain all over him, and a shock goes through him as if he ran head-on into a stone wall. A voice from the car says blurredly, while the ground rushes up to meet him, 'Finish him up, you guys! I'm getting so I don't trust their looks no more, no matter how stiff they act!' ("Jane Brown..
|
|
gunplay
mobsters
shot
noir
guns
mob
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
db7952c
|
The sun goes down and it's night-time in New Orleans. The moon rises, midnight chimes from St. Louis cathedral, and hardly has the last note died away than a gruesome swampland whistle sounds outside the deathly still house. A fat Negress, basket on arm, comes trudging up the stairs a moment later, opens the door, goes in to the papaloi, closes it again, traces an invisible mark on it with her forefinger and kisses it. Then she turns and he..
|
|
voodoo
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
7675e62
|
It had grown darker now; it was full night already, with the swiftness of the mountainous latitudes. The square of sky over the patio was soft and dark as indigo velour, with magnificent stars like many-legged silver spiders festooned on its underside. Below them the white roses gleamed phosphorescently in the starlight, with a magnesium-like glow. There was a tiny splash from the depths of the well as a pebble or grain of dislodged earth f..
|
|
night
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
6523cd3
|
Well, this is the hardest part to believe; look, you can suspend me if you want to, but it's the God's honest truth. This man Tompkins came all the way down to where I was bending over the body at the foot of the stairs. I straightened up and covered him with my gun. It didn't faze him in the least, he kept moving right on past me toward the street-door. Not quickly, either; as slowly as if he was just going out for a walk. He said, 'It isn..
|
|
fate
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
d754656
|
She was beautiful, only hers was the dark beauty of night, just as Sherry's was the bright beauty of daytime. Her hair was raven-black, ending in a sort of widow's peak low on her forehead, and her face and arms were alabaster- white. Her gown was a clinging thing of swirling black, almost like smoke, and two peculiar shoulder-draperies she wore, hanging down loosely and caught at the wrists, almost suggested great triangular wings when her..
|
|
vampire
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
db0ab3f
|
She opened a small silver compact and looked at her face in its mirror. I am still guiltless, she thought, I have not done it yet. But I will look the same when I have done it; nobody will know the difference by looking at me. She touched the little puff twice to her nose and once to her chin. She closed the compact and put it away. ("Mind Over Murder")"
|
|
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
57026f5
|
She had said: 'You could not hate anyone that much -' She was mistaken. What did she know? She felt so good right now, this must be hate, what else could it be? ("Mind Over Murder")"
|
|
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
e291feb
|
The car drives through, stops while the man closes and fastens the prickly gate behind it. The bell shuts off; the stillness is deafening by contrast. The car goes on until the outline of a house suddenly uptilts the searching headlight-beams, log-built, sprawling, resembling a hunting-lodge. But there's no friendliness to it. There is something ominous and forbidding about its look, so dark, so forgotten, so secretive-looking. The kind of ..
|
|
fear
house
horror
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
ee7460b
|
It must be dawn, and the last breath went out of this body on the table - how long before? Irretrievably gone from this world, as dead as though she had lived a thousand years ago. Men have cut the isthmus of Panama and joined the two oceans; they have bored tunnels that run below rivers; built aluminum planes that fly from Frisco to Manila; sent music over the air and photographs over wires; but never, when the heartbeat of their own kind ..
|
|
progress
science
medicine
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
d7f336e
|
Who else had ever met the business-end of a bolt of lightning in mid-flight, as he had just now, flying blind through a storm, lost a wing, managed to come down still alive even if it is on a wooded mountainside, to cut the contact at the moment of crashing so that he wasn't roasted alive, and crawl out with just a wrenched shoulder and a lot of cuts and bruises? He couldn't bail out because he was flying too low, hoping for a break through..
|
|
crash
pilot
plane
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
ab2a1ab
|
I wasn't that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little, publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn't write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I never thought I was that good at all. All that I thought was that I tried to tell the truth.
|
|
writer
writing
noir-fiction
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
375089b
|
It seems so long ago that he was last afraid of anything. Seventeen, was he then? Eighteen? Sometimes he thinks he's missing a lot by being like this - fear gives life a fillip. He wonders how it is he lost it all, and what there is - if anything - ever to bring it back. ("Jane Brown's Body")"
|
|
fear
fearless
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
38ef7b8
|
O'Shaughnessy is hitting Denholt on the side of his head with his free arm, great, walloping, pile-driver blows. The two of them stagger together, like partners in a crazy dance. Glass is breaking all around them. Gray smoke from the six shots, pink-and-white dust from the chipped brick-and-plaster walls, swirl around them in a rainbow haze. Something vividly green flares up from one of the overturned retorts, goes right out again. O'Shaugh..
|
|
fistfight
scuffle
fight
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
57a000d
|
Business after all is a form of warfare; you bring all your available weapons to bear. If you don't you're a fool. ("Jane Brown's Body")"
|
|
business-advice
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
6ab6674
|
That air of electric tension, of a great city on the edge of an abyss, is more noticeable than ever at the White Russian cabaret called, not inappropriately, "New York." You wouldn't know you were in China. An almond-eyed platinum-blonde has just finished wailing, with a Mott Street accent, "You're gonna lose your gal." ("Jane Brown's Body")"
|
|
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
5f94c9f
|
Go to Zillicks down the block. It has three booths at the back. Go in the middle one and wait. When you lamp me turning the pages of the directory outside, shove your money in the return-coin slot and walk out. Take it easy. Don't let the druggist see you. Your stuff'll be there when you go back for it. If you're even a dime short don't show up, it won't do ya no good. Twelve o'clock tonight.' 'Twelve o'clock;' Fisher agreed. They separat..
|
|
drug-dealer
pusher
drugs
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
01cf655
|
Men's loyalty to their women dies hard - and almost always too late. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")"
|
|
relationships
love
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
fffac0f
|
all a guy can do is die once. The big difference is whether he dies clean - or dirty... ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")"
|
|
morality
honor
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
8a88f35
|
She spent the vestigial hours of the night huddled in a large wing-chair, looking too small for it, her little harmonica-sized transistor radio purring away at her elbow. She kept it on the Paterson station, WPAT, which stayed on all night. There were others that did too, but they were crawling with commercials; this one wasn't. It kept murmuring the melodies of Roberta and Can-Can and My Fair Lady, while the night went by and the world, ou..
|
|
radio-shows
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
17664f2
|
She was the kind of shopkeeper who finishes the paragraph she is reading before waiting on the customer.
|
|
service
cashiers
shopkeeper
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
0db8513
|
The cemetery watchman left the room and returned with a tray holding three small skulls and a large one. I could feel the short hairs on the back of my neck standing up of their own accord. None of them were real though; they were wood or celluloid imitations. They all had flaps that opened at the top; one was a jug and the other three steins.
|
|
pulp
secret-society
secret-societys
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
ada3d05
|
The story thread suddenly dropped in a hopeless snarl, just as he was about to get it through the needle's eye of the first line.
|
|
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
6ed6459
|
We don't marry women, he thought; we marry angels, and in this moment or two of the marriage act, the scales fall from our eyes and we see them as they really are, perhaps never to glimpse it again. How lovely she is, how unearthly lovely.
|
|
marriage
love
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
5aa4dbd
|
Lew had never seen a dead man before. He just stood there, and looked and looked. Then he went a step closer, and looked some more. 'So that's what it's like!' he murmured inaudibly. Finally Lew reached out slowly and touched him on the face, and cringed as he met the clammy feel of it, pulled his hand back and whipped it down, as though to get something off it. The flesh was still warm and Lew knew suddenly he had no time alibi. He threw..
|
|
dying
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
bad29c6
|
He was standing by the window, looking down, when I went in. Even the sight of his back, sloping a little at the top with the inclination of his head, did something to me. And anyone that can love a back, can love. ("Don't Wait Up For Me Tonight")"
|
|
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
8e6ad40
|
I didn't look over my shoulder; there wasn't a sound behind me on the pavement, but I knew he was coming slowly after me. The crawl of the skin up and down my back told me. Little needles of warning that gathered at the back of my skull told me. I'd never known until then that the jungles aren't so very far behind us, after all, and tails, and four feet instead of two. Where else did those symptoms come from? ("Don't Wait Up For Me, Tonight..
|
|
stalking
suspense
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
8b81798
|
He should have caught up with me inside of fifteen minutes at the outside, if he'd been able to get on the next train after mine. But then there was that station agent to be considered. And Rafe didn't have a solitary coin on him; he'd have to break one of those fifties. I now remembered something that I'd been noticing half my life and that had never meant anything to me until today - a little sign outside each subway change booth, advisin..
|
|
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
f0fe496
|
The old frame house down near the waterfront had never held so many people since the day it was put up. It must have been a pleasant place fifty years before: trees overhanging the limpid water, cows grazing in the meadows on both sides of the river, little frame houses like this one dotting the banks here and there. It wasn't a pleasant place any more: garbage scows, coal yards, the river a greasy gray soup. Dead-end blocks of decrepit ten..
|
|
urban-decay
waterfront
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
2cdd64e
|
Murder is such an elastic term, isn't it? ("Mind Over Murder")"
|
|
|
Cornell Woolrich |