Sometimes I get hardboiled, noir fever and just have to read something about really nasty, desperate people and the things they do to try to avoid getting trapped by the law. (Other times I like reading sunny stories about nice, fluffy sheep. Okay, maybe I've been spending too much time at work picking books for the Storytime Cart.) I was in the mood for short fiction and Raymond Chandler's stories are just a little too long for what I had in mind, so I remembered this Woolrich omnibus I picked up a few years ago (another wonderful library discard).
Although this collection was published in 1984, the stories are all much older, spanning the years 1936 to 1942. You can immediately tell it from the descriptions of the cars, the clothes and the slang. These stories may not be as dark as later hardboiled crime fiction, but the level of suspense equals (or in most cases far surpasses) most anything you'll encounter today.
I've seen the Hitchcock version of Rear Window probably a dozen times, but had never read the short story. If you're in that situation, I recommend that you read it too. Some interesting differences. (But then again, when did Hitchcock ever faithfully adapt a story or novel?)
I'd never read any of the other stories, but they're all connected by a sense of desperation and nail-biting suspense. In "Post-Mortem," a woman goes to extreme lengths to find a winning lottery ticket purchased by her dead husband. "Momentum" shows just how bad things can get when your impulses take over from what's already a bad idea. (I wonder if this story was the inspiration for Scott Smith's novel A Simple Plan.) The collection's strongest story (at least in terms of suspense) is "Three O'Clock," in which a husband conspires to kill both his wife and her lover with a time bomb. The ending was a bit of a let-down, but I've found few writers that can build suspense like Woolrich does in this story. If you should run across this collection (or the omnibus) at a good price, buy it.
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