It’s been over two years since I reviewed any Cornell Woolrich, which seems incredible when you consider how completely I loved his work when he first started appearing on The Invisible Event. But, well, behind the scenes I’ve struggled through some of his stuff — the doom-drenched but ooooooverlong The Black Alibi (1942) and the somewhat tedious, Francis Nevins-edited Night and Fear [ss] (2004) collection — and lost the name of action, so to speak. But you can’t keep a good fan down, and so it’s back to the novels and The Black Angel (1943), which interestingly finds a new way to explore themes and approaches that would seem to recur throughout Woolrich’s oeuvre.

When her husband it sentenced to death for the murder of his mistress, 22 year-old Alberta Murray — who knows, or at least strongly believes, him to be innocent for reasons that I’ll leave you to discover — manages to acquire a list of four names, one of whom she firmly believes must be responsible for the murder. And so, as seen in the likes of The Bride Wore Black (1940) and as would go on to be used in Rendezvous in Black (1948), we get treated to a series of vignettes — almost individual short stories, really — in which Alberta worms her way into the lives of these people in an effort to find evidence of their guilt that she can present to Homicide detective Wesley Flood and free her beloved, adulterous Kirk.

There’s a difficulty with this structure (rot13 for not-really-spoilers: vg’f uneqyl yvxryl gung gur svefg thl vf tbaan or thvygl, vf vg?) which isn’t helped by some of the vignettes being decidedly overlong themselves: chapter 7, which brings Alberta into contact with the suspicious Dr. Mordaunt, really doesn’t need to remind us every three pages how new this is and how nervous she is and how she has to screw up her courage every single time…just get on with it, because, well, see that rot13’d issue above.

The excess of detail is almost justified by the era this was written in, since the comfortably middle class Murrays mixing in a stratum of society where they wouldn’t normally find themselves would have had about it an air of the salacious. And I can’t deny that some of Woolrich’s writing does a magnificent job of conveying the downward trajectory faced by some of these men (“It was more than a step down; it was a vertical drop.”), and little touches like the way the argot of these lower classes catches our heroine by surprise is neatly handled. And, of course, human despair is Woolrich’s stock-in-trade:

A living man could have been in worse rags than they wore, and he would still be a living man. One of them could have been put into the swankiest apparel to be found and he would have still remained –what he was. A lamp with the wick burned out. A bulb with the filaments worn out. Something still intact but that no longer gives off light.

There’s also a high degree of interest to be found in the varied approaches Alberta must take: feeling her way into the unknown world of each of these men, or accidentally working her way into the good graces of a nightclub owner. And it’s pleasing, too, that Woolrich doesn’t simply let her have it all her own way, with some of her schemes backfiring so that the police end up suspicious of her and the choices she is making. Additionally, she gets emotionally caught up with one of these men in a way that she isn’t expecting, and, well, you’ll have to see how her creator extricates her from that dilemma.

It’s not quite as successful as the two books previously mentioned, not least because the driving motivation at its core is the intended freedom of a man who clearly had no appreciation for the woman who is going to these ends for him (honestly, Kirk Murray seems like a bit of a prick). But, again, Woolrich has a habit of leading you up to something you wouldn’t ordinarily look at and then getting you to look at it in a way you’d never have thought so that you find something heartbreaking and beautiful amidst the squalor.

There was something hideously naked about it. Obscene, almost. Pleasure, turned inside out to show its lining, always is.

The Black Alibi doesn’t quite hit the heights of Woolrich’s other novels I’ve reviewed on here to date, but, for a mostly tightly-plotted descent into the cauldron of New York’s dark side in search of the hope which is so often keenly-sought in his works, it hits the notes you would hope for if you’ve discovered this author’s form of doom-saying to be your particular jam. Kirk Murray may be an imbecile who doesn’t know a good woman when he sees one, but I for one appreciate everything Alberta went through, and mostly enjoyed going through it all with her.

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See also

Ben @ The Green Capsule: Cornell Woolrich cements himself as one of the few authors that I’m going to have to read to completion. The Black Angel isn’t quite as tight as Rendezvous in Black, and it lacks the shock ending of Phantom Lady, but it’s an absolute page turner.

Guy @ His Futile Preoccupations: There’s a loneliness here in Alberta’s journey to the truth, and that loneliness and isolation seems to be reflected in everyone she meets. For fans of the genre, or for those who haven’t tried Woolrich, this dark tale of the forbidden world of lust, despair and madness perforated by decency and goodness is well worth catching.