Cornell Woolrich, 'The Bride Wore Black' (1940)

Cornell Woolrich’s first crime novel, The Bride Wore Black, was published in 1940, after Woolrich had already published several jazz-age novels in the style of his literary model F. Scott Fitzgerald, and after he had established a reputation as a prolific and talented writer of stories for pulp magazines. Like so many other crime fiction writers who came to the genre after writing other types of narratives, Woolrich found in crime fiction the perfect means of expressing his bleak view of the world in a manner that is simultaneously lyrical and chilling. Bride is a revenge narrative, with the twist that the avenger is a young woman whose husband was killed moments after they were married. She then devotes years of her life to tracking down and killing the men she holds responsible for her husband’s death, assuming a different identity each time, and always trading on her ability to read the men’s weaknesses. As such, Bride is not only a powerful exploration of the extremes to which melancholic revenge can push one, but also an utterly unsentimental and insightful analysis of contemporary American masculinity. In this regard, the fact that the plot hinges on an incredible coincidence and is filled with various other examples of the unlikely does nothing to diminish its power. Not only is Bride still effective as an anatomization of male vanity and stupidity, but the role of random chance in Woolrich’s fictional universe is the perfect objective correlative for the animating principle of that universe: meaningless chaos.