Mystery in Room 913

Cornell Woolrich is "our greatest writer of Suspense Fiction" - Francis Nevins, Woolrich biographer.


Mystery in Room 913 is one of Woolrich's short stories that could really be classified as a novelette based upon it's length. Set in New York, a place he lived with his mother, and where many of his stories take place, it's the story of Room 913 in the Hotel St. Anselm, where three men check in and unexplainably jump out of the window to their deaths. The detective who investigates refuses to believe that all three men coincidentally committed suicide in the same room of the same hotel. Not until the detective checks into the room himself does the reader learn of the secret of Room 913. 


This is one of Cornell Woolrich's classics. It delivers the kind of suspense that Woolrich fans have come to love. 


The story was also published under the title The Room with Something Wrong in a collection of stories entitled Somebody on the Phone.


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.