Pulp Pages: Rendezvous in Black by Cornell Woolrich - Page 2

But if “revenge is a dish best served cold,” Woolrich chills it down several degrees further as his cold-around-the-heart character doesn’t content himself with just killing each suspect. He wants them to live and endure the same mental anguish as — on May 31st of each year — he exacts retribution upon their loved ones, leaving taunting notes that ask, “Now you know what it feels like. So how do you like it?”

In Rendezvous in Black’s accumulative, page-turning race-against-time, the twists and turns have their own twists and turns, and a reader can go for several pages of uncertainty as to which one of several possible scenarios is being played out, and by whom. Speaking of characters, it is a mark of Woolrich’s devilry-in-the-details craftsmanship that even the secondary personalities are as carefully considered and nuanced as the main protagonists and antagonists; surprisingly perhaps, Woolrich displays a keen and sympathetic understanding of women.

In any case, the only sure thing in this tense, any-which-way-but-lucid cat-and-mouse game — the pursuer is a seeming bumbler of a Colombo-like detective — is the portentous and perennial despair of darkness and shadow that allows for no shades of gray. Each rendezvous is truly a date with a dimming destiny bearing down by any means necessary: “A train of death. A cavalcade of doom. Dozens of black cars, scores of them; shaking the rails, shaking the night…”

Even ostensible refuge and escape may comprise wasted effort: “And now they were on a ship, coursing deep water, crossing an ocean between two worlds. The eternal darkness was still around her…”

Then it closes in: “Night came on in her heart. One by one, all the lights went out. It got cold, and a wind from nowhere knifed at her. Her step didn’t falter; outwardly there was nothing to show that, within her, the whole world was going down into blackness.”

Into, indeed, a dark with something more than night, a darkness that changes only to another darkness.

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores. Email him and he'll stop talking in the third-person.
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