Pulp master at the roots of a genre

Cornell Woolrich, considered by many to be the father of the modern suspense story thanks to mesmerizing noir nightscapes such as “Phantom Lady” and “I Married a Dead Man,” was born just over 100 years ago, on Dec. 4, 1903. That literary milestone is the ostensible raison d’etre for this new collection of 14 short thrillers, culled by the author’s biographer, Francis M. Nevins, from more than 200 published in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s.

Nevins narrowed his selections to stories that have not been collected previously, a criterion that, although it provides readers with relatively fresh examples of the author’s art, simultaneously makes one wonder why the 14 failed to make the earlier cuts. Not to worry. Though few of the stories are on a par with the Woolrich tale that prompted Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film “Rear Window,” these dark and riveting little thrill rides don’t disappoint readers when it comes to unusual conflicts and unremitting suspense.

Woolrich wrote these stories during the Great Depression, shortly after his seventh F. Scott Fitzgerald-inspired Jazz Age saga was snubbed by publishers. That, added to a brief, unsuccessful stab at screenwriting and an even briefer and less successful attempt at marriage, had left him in desperate straits. Painfully withdrawn, filled with self-loathing over his failures and living in a series of ever more depressing Manhattan hotels with his mother, he turned to a different form of fiction, the mystery story. The resulting tales, vivid, feverish and imbued with a hard-earned knowledge of life’s darker aspects, were quickly recognized by pulp magazine editors as something special.

“Night & Fear’s” stories are set in an urban, dusk-to-dawn Depression-era dream world, in which twists of fate drive men, women and even a child to desperation and beyond. Presented in order of publication, they demonstrate the author’s segue from the frantic pace and breathless action endemic to pulp fiction to a darker and more chilling psychological terror that would, in the early 1940s, distinguish his “Black” novels (beginning with “The Bride Wore Black”) and that have had a marked influence on crime movies as current as Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill,” which borrows “Bride’s” avenging-widow premise.

What the collection’s earliest stories lack in subtlety and character dimension they make up in agile plotting, tightened by remorseless tension. In a 1936 example, “Cigarette,” a genial but dim young man known as the Errand Boy is set up by a mob boss to deliver a “special” cigarette to a rival gangster. But in his innocence he offers the smoke to a stranger in need. Discovering the disastrous consequence of his kindness, he must gather his wits to find the man, stop him from taking a fatal puff and then find a way to avoid the mob boss’ wrath.

The hapless, homeless hero of “The Heavy Sugar” finds a string of diamonds in a cafe sugar bowl, then has to hide the gems -- and himself -- from the killers who stole them. In “You Bet Your Life,” two gamblers wager $1,000 over whether a randomly chosen man on the street could be pushed into murder.

These are solidly crafted suspense yarns, but they’re not quite on a par with “Endicott’s Girl,” written in 1938, in which a police chief begins to suspect that his teenage daughter may be a murderer. Or “The Fatal Footlights” from 1941, in which a burlesque queen dies from an excess of gold body paint (anticipating Ian Fleming’s “Goldfinger” by a couple of decades). Or “The Case of the Killer-Dinner,” which, despite the awful title, is a nifty whodunit involving a murder-prone jazz group that mixes cocaine, bebop, Ravel and Freud. Quite a combination for 1939.

Two novellas offer evidence of Woolrich’s cleverness in updating a concept. In “Through a Dead Man’s Eyes,” the 12-year-old narrator sets out to catch a killer to help his recently demoted policeman dad. In the considerably more sophisticated “The Death Rose,” written four years later in 1943, a beautiful socialite, hearing that her detective fiance’s job rests on the capture of a serial killer with a fondness for dance hall girls, decides to use herself as bait to nail the slayer.

The collection closes with the author’s final and arguably finest story, “New York Blues,” a monologue delivered by a man of means who has killed someone earlier in the evening. He sits at a hotel room window downing drinks and watching night fall on Manhattan while he awaits the arrival of the police. The beautifully written prose hits all of Woolrich’s personal obsessions: guilt, revenge, alienation, loneliness and, oddest of all for a near-recluse, a genuine affection for the city and its people.

“Blues” debuted in the pages of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1970, but the author didn’t live to see it. He died of a stroke on Sept. 25, 1968. A scribbled note found among his effects offered this hope for his fiction: “I was only trying to stay alive a little brief while longer, after I was already gone. To stay in the light, to be with the living a little while past my prime.”

Mission accomplished.