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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN num: 9780812971453
ISBN number: 0812971450
Label: Modern Library
Manufacturer: Modern Library
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 240
Printing Date: March 16, 2004
Publishing house: Modern Library
Release Date: March 16, 2004
Sale Popularity Level: 385501
Studio: Modern Library
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On a mild midwestern night in the early 1940s, Johnny Marr leans against a drugstore wall. He’s waiting for Dorothy, his fiancée, and tonight is the last night they’ll be meeting here, for it’s May 31st, and June 1st marks their wedding day. But she’s late, and Johnny soon learns of a horrible accident—an accident involving a group of drunken men, a low-flying charter plane, and an empty liquor bottle. In one short moment Johnny loses all that matters to him and his life is shattered. He vows to take from these men exactly what they took from him. After years of planning, Johnny begins his quest for revenge, and on May 31st of each year—always on May 31st—wives, lovers, and daughters are suddenly no longer safe.
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Rated by buyers -
Cornell Woolrich is a little known master who deserves to be discovered. I encourage you readers to walk down his inky grey streets, to hide among the shadows, and know what it is to live in fear.
Rated by buyers 
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RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK, one of the final novels in Cornell Woolrich's famous "black" series that have formed the basis for so many films noirs, is one of his most highly praised works. It is enormously suspenseful: an anonymous young man whose fiancée has been killed in a freak accident instigated by a group of wealthy hunters in a low-flying plane takes his revenge by systematically murdering the woman most beloved to each of the five men so they can share in his grief. Each of the five murders occurs in a different chapter and told in a different style: we know that a woman is going to get it and when, but we don't know how and sometimes we don't even know who. Simultaneously, a police detetctive begins assembling clues to catch the killer. Certainly Woolrich can draw out the suspense in each chapter, and the schematic narrative (which often refers to the characters as "the man" or "the woman") invests the narrative with an almost allegorical quality that makes the whole work seem over-the-top. But there's very little character development in the text, and the shoddy ironic twists in several of the stories seem telegraphed a mile away. Also, the misogynistic undercurrent to most romans noirs seems queasily overemphasized here: except for the very first victim (who dies the most gruesome of the deaths), each of the killer's targets intentionally defies the dictates of male authorities in her life, as if to suggest she deserves what's coming to her. Although on one hand this seems almost a pure distillation of the operatic fatalism of the roman noir, it's simply not as good a work as Woolrich's more fleshed-out books like WALTZ INTO DARKNESS or I MARRIED A DEAD MAN--not to mention such superior suspense novels of the period as (for example) Kenneth Fearing's THE BIG CLOCK or Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's THE BLANK WALL.
Rated by buyers -
The introduction to this novel says that Woolrich has been described as the "Hitchcock of the Written Word," but adds that maybe he wouldn't have liked this description. It might be even more accurate to say that Hitchcock is the Cornell Woolrich of the cinema - since many of Woolrich's works came before Hitchcock's, and Hitch even adapted one of Woolrich's stories into one of his most famous movies, Rear Window.
The point, though, is that this guy writes suspense like you've never seen. I say "seen" because reading his novels is really a visceral experience. I don't know how he does it but Woolrich can write a beautiful, elegant story that you can sort of just almost SEE unfolding like a movie --- a movie that will move you emotionally and also scare the bejesus out of you.
Rendezvous in Black contains six interlinked stories about six doomed love affairs threatened by violence. Five of these are labelled "The First Rendezvous" through "The Fifth Rendezvous." The sixth is the story that ties them all together (but it comes very first in sequence). I don't want to spoil the experience of reading this book for anyone, but overall it is just amazing and I cannot recommend it more highly. Woolrich, as has been noted here already, was a protege of F. Scott Fitzgerald's. Like Dashiell Hammett, he's an author who makes mysteries somehow as beautiful as what passes for "literature" - yet so emotionally gripping that you hardly notice till you are done how beautiful the craft of what you just read really was. The characters are spectacular and each one is described with wonderful psychological details. One of my favorites is this description of the police detective:
"He was too thin, and his face wore a chronically haggard look...His manner was a mixture of uncertainty, followed by flurries of hasty action, followed by more uncertainty, as if he already regretted the just preceding action. He always acted new at any given proceedings, as if he were undertaking them for the very first time. Even when they were old, and he should have been used to them."
Little gems like this are on almost every page of this book and they make for a wonderful reading experience you won't forget.
I envy anyone about to read Cornell Woolrich for the very first time. This book is a great place to start.
Rated by buyers -
On a mild midwestern night in the early 1940s, Johnny Marr leans against a drugstore wall. He's waiting for Dorothy, his fiancée, and tonight is the last night they'll be meeting here, for it's May 31st, and June 1st marks their wedding day. But she's late, and Johnny soon learns of a horrible accident - an accident involving a group of drunken men, a low-flying charter plane, and an empty liquor bottle. In one short moment Johnny loses all that matters to him and his life is shattered. He vows to take from these men exactly what they took from him. After years of planning, Johnny begins his quest for revenge, and on May 31st of each year - always on May 31st - wives, lovers, and daughters are suddenly no longer safe ... Cornell Woolrich's most justly famous novel is one of the true masterpieces of suspense. Johnny exacts his revenge in five meticulously planned and utterly unpredictable murders that Woolrich unfolds with an almost demonic fatalism while the marvellously unheroic police officer MacLain Cameron is in accelerating pursuit. Woolrich's prose is unique. His style is strongly visual - we'd now call it cinematic even though it prefigured much of the film-noir effects that render it, today, almost cliché. His syntax is occasionally tortured, his word choices odd. Yet as his biographer Francis Nevins has noted, Woolrich's imperfections are a happy marriage of form and function. Without the sentences rushing out of control across the page like his hunted characters across the nightscape, without the maniacal emotionalism and indifference to grammatical niceties, the form and content of the Woolrich world would be at odds. Between his style and substance, Woolrich achieved the perfect union. There are moments when the melodrama builds to such an intensity that it tumbles over into a kind of empathy, e.g. Cameron's late visit to Dorothy's childhood home. You know it's ridiculous, but you feel something all the same. As monstrous as Johnny Marr's revenge is, few readers will be able to damn him completely. This kind of amoral centre is the dark sun around which much of the noir world turns, and Woolrich gives us one of the genre's finest examples. The Modern Library's 20th Century Rediscoveries edition is particularly valuable for its Reading Group Guide, and for Richard Dooling's fine introduction which points to further reading and finds the origins of the novel in Woolrich's own startlingly sad biography. Strongly recommended.
Rated by buyers -
This is a suspense story in which one knows the killer and his victims and where there is nothing random about his choice of victims. The murders are acts of revenge against an unpremeditated, accidental death - a death that one can only characterize as 'fateful.' A bottle has been thrown from an airplane, killing a young woman standing by a store window in a busy street. She is waiting for her fiance. Out of the hundreds of people walking that street, it is she who has been dealt this fatal blow. It is an accident that could not have been foreseen, though it can be argued, that its negligence might have been anticipated.
That is the beginning of the story. Woolrich wastes no time in setting the psychological tone. Her fiance arrives at their place of rendezvous, the scene of the accident, looks at the stricken woman, denies that it is his "Dorothy", then leaves the scene. Despite this initial denial, he knows, of course, that it is she, and from that moment a cataclysmic change occurs in his personality and his present world falls apart - a world of romance, marriage and well being. He sheds all innocence and becomes a man singularly possessed - a man seeking revenge against the carelessness of other men - determined to have them pay for this carelessness in the same way he has been forced to pay - destruction of what they prize most.
It is a story, wonderfully told - direct, gripping and so thoroughly credible that you read through it quickly, hoping against hope that it will have a happy ending. But it doesn't.
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