He contracts for a mail-order bride from St. Now an affluent businessman at thirty-seven, Louis is nonetheless lonely, lost, and terrified of growing old alone. Fifteen years earlier, his fiancée died of yellow fever on the night before their wedding. All that poor Louis Durand, the novel’s ostensible hero, wants is to love, and be loved. Woolrich’s longest novel, Waltz trades his usual Manhattan nightscapes for the gaslight and cobblestones of 1880 New Orleans. It came near the end of an incredibly prolific period in his creative life-from 1940 to 1950-that saw the publication of eleven classic suspense novels and dozens of short stories. And in that work, there is no better example than Waltz into Darkness.įirst published in 1947, Waltz was written under Woolrich’s William Irish pseudonym, which he had previously used for his novels Phantom Lady and Deadline at Dawn. Nowhere is that truer than in the work of Cornell Woolrich, America’s greatest noir novelist.
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