Cornell Woolrich’s Rendezvous in Black

Cornell Woolrich’s Rendezvous in Black was published in 1948. Woolrich’s particular genius is that his stories were so perfectly adapted to film adaptation. Very few writers have had more stories adapted for film and TV and that made him a crucial figure in the history of pop culture. And it turned out to be almost impossible to make a bad movie from a Cornell Woolrich story.

He wasn’t a great prose stylist, not even close to being in the same league as a Raymond Chandler, but Woolrich had a knack for coming up with really nasty gut-punch plots.

This book starts with a guy named Johnny Marr, a very ordinary guy, waiting to meet his girl at a drugstore. They’ve been planning to get married for a long time and pretty soon it’s going to be possible. The guy has come into some money, more than enough for them to get married. But he is destined never to marry Dorothy. She is killed in an accident.

That sets in train a series of bizarre and inexplicable murders. Very complicated murders.

The detective investigating the first murder has a problem. He is the only one who believes it is murder. There is however not the slightest chance of proving it.

Two more strange murders occur, apparently totally unconnected except for one tiny detail. That tiny detail detail convinces the cop he’s on to something but he has no idea what it is that he’s on to. He just fears that there will be more murders.

This is a kind of suspense story in five parts, with the detective’s investigation hovering in the background.

It’s a suspense novel but there’s a mystery as well. The solution to the mystery is so clearly signposted that one must assume that Woolrich intends the reader to figure it out without any difficulty. The detective however simply does not have the vital pieces of the puzzle that would allow him to solve the case.

There’s some very fine suspense. Woolrich is generally regarded as a noir writer and to a considerable extent he is, but he’s not quite a typical noir writer. And Rendezvous in Black is not quite typical noir fiction. You expect a noir protagonist to be at least partially responsible for the mess he gets himself into. He’s usually a slightly ambiguous figure, neither wholly good nor wholly bad. In this case there’s no character flaw. It’s just pure dumb bad luck - the remorseless working of impersonal and indifferent fate.

You also expect a femme fatale to play a major part in the protagonist’s downfall. There’s no femme fatale here.

There is the classic noir feature of impending and inescapable doom. Mostly this is a suspense novel but there’s more to it than that. This is perhaps an existentialist crime novel, or an absurdist crime novel. That sets it apart from noir where you have the feeling that no matter how tragic the story it does have a kind of logical inevitability. In Rendezvous in Black there’s nothing logical about life - it’s as if the universe has played a horrible trick on Johnny Marr for no reason whatsoever except that that’s how the universe works. And most of the characters in this novel are in the same position - it is impossible to see any reason why such things should happen to them. So overall I think absurdism is closer to the mark here than noir.

The plot is also more satisfying if considered from that perspective. Sometimes we’re the victims of bizarre crazy coincidences that can never be understood in rational terms. The plot here is outlandish because that’s the way Woolrich wanted it to feel.

It doesn’t matter whether the characters in this book are good people or bad people. Some of them are very good people. Some are very bad. Some are neither particularly good or bad. It doesn’t matter. The universe will stomp you anyway. Noir is pessimist but this is a different kind of pessimism.

Rendezvous in Black is very Woolrichian and it’s powerful stuff. Highly recommended.

Like so many of Woolrich’s books this one has been filmed - Rendezvous in Black was the source material for Umberto Lenzi’s excellent 1972 krimi-giallo hybrid Seven Blood-Stained Orchids

I’ve also reviewed Woolrich’s 1942 Black Alibi.