Review of I Married a Dead Man by Cornell Woodrich (Penguin, 1948)

Originally from San Francisco, but having moved to New York, Helen is 19 and eight months pregnant with the child of gambler and cad, Steve Georgesson.  He abandons her, leaving her with a train ticket home and five dollars.  On a packed train she meets Patrice, who is similarly pregnant, and her husband, Hugh, who are travelling to meet his parents for the first time.  Patrice is an only child and her parents are dead.  Sharing the bathroom, Helen minds Patrice’s wedding ring to stop it slipping down the plughole, but then the train derails.  Patrice and Hugh perish, but Helen survives along with her premature baby.  She wakes in a hospital and is assumed to be Patrice.  Every time she tries to reveal the truth, fate conspires against her, and once she is ensconced in Hugh’s parent’s comfortable house the lie is sealed.  For the next couple of years Helen lives in fear of her secret being discovered and then Georgesson reappears in her life, threatening blackmail.

Cornell Woodrich was a prolific writer of short stories and noir novels.  His stories were made into 33 noir movies.  Published in 1948, I Married A Dead Man was produced as a movie on four occasions.  The tale tells the story of a young, pregnant woman who takes the identity of another woman who has died, along with husband, in a train accident, and subsequently lives in fear of being discovered.  Whilst the tale is a little melodramatic at times, both the telling and the plot are excellent, with a wicked twist in the denouement.  Woodrich saturates the story with paranoia, anxiety and desperation through some evocative prose, and peppers the tale with astute observations about the various players.  The result is a compelling, dark, atmospheric tale by one of the noir masters of the twentieth century.

Review of Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye by Horace McCoy (1948, Signet)

Ralph Cotter, a college graduate and and self-centred, scheming psychopath, has been recruited by femme fatale, Holiday, to spring her brother from prison.  The plan is to recover a gun hidden in a ditch on the prison farm then make a dash for a waiting vehicle.  Everything goes to plan, Holiday providing covering fire with a machine gun, except Ralph kills Holiday’s brother, frustrated at his hesitation.  Having driven to a large town, Ralph and Holiday start a fractious relationship, with Ralph already planning his return to crime after a couple of years behind bars.  With little compunction about taking a life to further his ambitions, he’s soon committed another fatal armed robbery and has entered into a dangerous game with local, crooked cops.  And shortly after he’s got himself mixed up with a rich woman.  The sensible thing to do would be leave town, but Ralph believes he can outwit the police and play his accomplices and two women at the same time.

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is considered to be a noir classic, first published in 1948 and made into a movie starring James Cagney in 1950.  The story charts the scheming, amoral life of ‘Ralph Cotter’ (one of a set of aliases), who compulsively lies, cheats, steals and, with little prompting, kills or commits violence.  The strength of the book is the characterisation and the interplay between the main protagonists, especially Ralph and femme fatale, Holiday, who uses her sexuality to twist men round her little finger.  The plot is pure hardboiled noir.  Indeed, the tagline of the tale is: 'Love as hot as a blow torch ... crime as vicious as the jungle'.  The start of the story is excellent, quickly hooking the reader in.  However, after about a third of the way in the style and pace noticeably changes, the action dissipating and the narrative becoming more psychological in orientation.  Scenes get a little drawn out, there’s needless repetition of thoughts/dialogue, and the plot loses drive and direction.  To my mind it would have been preferable to keep the pace a bit higher and narrative tighter.  Nevertheless, the tale is a fascinating account of a man obsessed with being as equally ruthless as Dillinger, but being much cleverer and successful in his criminal pursuits.