Manhattan Love Song

"Nothing beats a tale of fatalistic dread by the supreme master of suspense, Cornell Woolrich. His novels and hundreds of short stories define the essence of noir nihilism." -Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review


Cornell Woolrich is "our greatest writer of Suspense Fiction."

"Manhattan Love Song is the first Woolrich book to be narrated in first person, so that we are trapped inside the male protagonist's mind and skin... Countless other elements from his suspense fiction show up for the first time in concentrated form... In virtually every respect Manhattan Love Song belongs not with Woolrich's earlier mainstream novels but alongside his novels and stories of suspense and despair. His sixth [novel] represented a huge leap forward, with an exceptionally tight and unified structure and only three central players, each so well drawn..." -Francis Nevins, Woolrich biographer.


"This 1932 novel presages Woolrich's emergence as a noir star, and it finds him exploring suitably dark relationship themes. Blow past unhappily married narrator Wade's melodramatic first encounter with mobbed-up party girl Bernice Pascal on the pre-Depression Manhattan streets, and the story soon settles into a snappy Jazz Age essay of the many crimes lonely, deluded hearts willingly commit. Although Wade's sardonic jibes and cocky narcissism feel downright contemporary as he obsessively pursues his dangerous dame, Woolrich displays classic descriptive gifts when showing readers a moon looming "like a gilt thumbtack nailing the blue plush carpet that was the sky closer to the floor of heaven," and later, "a natty fellow who looked as though he'd had his clothes poured over him hot, and then allowed to harden... noir fans will find plenty in it to enjoy." Frank Sennett, Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Classic films like Hitchcock's Rear Window and Trauffaut's The Bride Wore Black and novels like Night has a Thousand Eyes and Rendezvous in Black earned Woolrich epithets like "the twentieth century's Edgar Allen Poe" and "the father of noir."


"This novel is [Woolrich's] initial attempt (1932) at what we now call noir, which he unknowingly helped invent. This tale of a young couple whose hot love brings out the worst in them offers all the trappings of the genre. Woolrich's stuff holds up well, so give this a shot." - Library Journal Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.


Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (4 December 1903 – 25 September 1968) is one of America's best crime and noir writers who sometimes wrote under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley. He's often compared to other celebrated crime writers of his day, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler.

He attended New York's Columbia University but left school in 1926 without graduating when his first novel,"Cover Charge", was published."Cover Charge" was one of six of his novels that he credits as inspired by the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Woolrich soon turned to pulp and detective fiction, often published under his pseudonyms. His best known story today is his 1942 "It Had to Be Murder" for the simple reason that it was adapted into the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie "Rear Window" starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly. It was remade as a television film by Christopher Reeve in 1998.