Posted by Francis M. Nevins
on 11/1/2001, 12:38 pm
Last week, while doing research on the legendary mystery writer and critic Anthony Boucher at Indiana University's Lilly Library, I came across his correspondence with Woolrich and his comments about various Woolrich stories. There's not enough to turn into an article but the material I found will certainly go into the second edition of FIRST YOU DREAM, THEN YOU DIE if there ever is one. Meanwhile I'd like to share it with visitors to the Woolrich website.
Boucher's first later dates from the late spring of 1944 when he wanted to reprint a Woolrich tale in his anthology GREAT AMERICAN DETECTIVE STORIES (World, 1945). Replying on June 5, 1944, Woolrich says: "'Endicott's Girl' is my favorite among all the stories I've ever written." Boucher however didn't care for that one. In a letter of July 19 to William Targ of World he says: "It has in extreme measure the frequent Woolrich flaw---a fine emotional story which ends with loose ends all over the place and nothing really explained." In the end Boucher opted for "Finger of Doom" (1940), which he retitled "I Won't Take a Minute."
On July 20, one day after his letter to Targ, Boucher wrote Woolrich again, saying: "In the past month or two, I've read over 30 Woolrich pulp stories. And even from such a dose as that, I still feel no indigestion; which means, I take it, that you are (as I have suspected all along) the goods. Keep 'em coming!"
Woolrich's reply, dated July 23, solves one of the puzzles of his working life that I could never answer before last week. I've suspected for years that his story "The Penny-a-Worder," about a pulp writer who has to write a story overnight to go with an already completed front cover illustration, came from a real Woolrich experience. Now I know it for a fact. In his July 23 letter Woolrich tells Boucher that he particularly remembers his story "Guns, Gentlemen" (Argosy, Dec. 18, 1937) "because I wrote it to match up with the cover of the magazine, which they sent me." I doubt very much, though, that he wrote that story in a single night!
Finally we come to a file card that apparently dates from 1950 or early 1951 when Boucher and J. Francis McComas were co-editing The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Describing Woolrich's "Jane Brown's Body" (All-American Fiction, March-April 1938), Boucher says: "This brilliantly macabre concept spoiled for me by 2 things: a.) My pet irritation of writing excvlusively in present tense; b.) A pulp plot so formulaly obvious that each step can be accurately forecast. Inept, for Woolrich, but because of his name let's include." The story was in fact reprinted in F&SF for October 1951.
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