Cornell Woolrich, 'The Black Curtain' (1941)

Alfred Hitchcock’s fondness for Cornell Woolrich’s work, most famously evidenced by Rear Window, is well known, and Woolrich’s The Black Curtain (1941) takes for its subject one of Hitchcock’s favorite subjects: an innocent man plunged into a frightening situation, wrongly accused of a crime, and struggling to prove his innocence. Like Hitchcock, Woolrich finds this subject appealing because the situation of the innocent man at the heart of such a scenario resembles so closely (albeit in an intensified form) Woolrich’s view of the human condition more generally: any sense of happiness one achieves is temporary and fragile at best because it is always subject to being destroyed by the forces of random chaos that can sweep away all security, certainty, and knowledge in a moment. That moment comes for Woolrich’s protagonist, Frank Townsend, when he recovers from a three-year bout of amnesia. On the surface, the beginning of the story resembles a happy ending, in that he is restored to his old life, including an adoring wife and his job, but when he starts being hunted by a threatening man whom he does not recognize, Townsend must go back into the mysterious past to find out who he was and what he did that is now threatening his life and security. This being Woolrich, the happy ending is eventually secured, at least in a formal fashion, but is unsatisfying to the reader for a couple of reasons. First, the resolution of Townsend’s problems occurs rapidly at the end of the novel in a manner that (I would argue) is deliberately unconvincing in the sense that it does little to allay the reader’s discomfort. In other words, the vast majority of the novel is dominated by Townsend’s incomprehension and fear, and it is the suspense generated by these emotions that dominates the reader’s reaction to the novel, not the happy resolution. Second, even if we take the resolution at face value, the message of The Black Curtain remains that one’s life can be destroyed in the blink of an eye by a cruel and random chance act; imagine living life with that knowledge at the front of your mind every day and you get some sense of the bleakness of Woolrich’s view of the world.