“One pushed a young broker’s clerk off a terrace. The other dropped cyanide into the drink of a seedy ne’er-do-well in a mangy hotel.”

I really enjoyed this book! A real page turner of vengeance! I really liked how each of the attacks was planned and carried out! And I wish the killer hadn't have been caught - I'd have loved a sequel! I was so into this that I almost read it in one day! Bravo!

“We went away all right - but not together. And we neither of us ever came back again.” ( )

Classic film noir type fiction by one of the masters of the genre. A woman is on a quest for vengeance and is eliminating men one by one, very cleverly getting into their blindspot each time and taking on a different character then doing a disappearing act afterwards. A detective believes the crimes are all committed by the same woman but for a long time is baffled although he doesn't give up the pursuit. I was enjoying this right up to the denoument which I found so weak and contrived, and also could not believe that the woman would have jumped to the conclusions she did if she had known her husband had an enemy so that spoiled it for me unfortunately. ( )

In essence, The Bride Wore Black is the culmination of everything Cornell Woolrich had been building up to in the pulps. Here he completely abandoned his original dream of becoming the next Fitzgerald. The Bride Wore Black reaches for greatness, and nearly attains it. Anyone who has read it before, or has heard discussions about it, knows that the ending is flawed, a letdown of the wonderful journey the reader has taken. But like the film Apocalypse Now, that journey is so galvanizing we can’t stop reading despite what we know.

Though a fully fleshed-out novel, in The Bride Wore Black you can feel the influence of the pulps much more so than in his other big works. It moves at a pace reminiscent of the whiz-bang pulp story, only lengthened, and is mesmerizing. A girl works her way into the lives of several men, and then kills them as police try to connect the killings and make sense of it. Woolrich gives the impression she must be a tragic figure, a pretty angel avenging some dark and horrible deed the reader has yet to discover. The reader becomes sympathetic to a murderer, sensing that once all is revealed, these men must have done something to deserve their fate. The reader is in a way almost rooting for her, eager to discover what’s behind it all, so we can feel her pain and wish for some last-second reprieve where she gets away.

It is at this point, near the finish, when Woolrich pulls the rug out from under us. Reading The Bride Wore Black after decades, I couldn’t help feeling that Woolrich began to have doubts about the long-form, at least for this particular story, and reverted to a pulp-style ending. It might have worked in a short story, but having created so much sympathy for the avenging angel over the course of the novel, it does just the opposite. It doesn’t negate how wonderful 9/10 of the book is, but it does mar the reader’s experience.

Woolrich himself felt the work had flaws, and basically rewrote it seven or eight years later, this time with a male protagonist — and a much, much darker mood — in Rendezvous in Black. The Bride Wore Black is better known today for the 1968 film adaptation by French filmmaker Truffaut, who also changed the ending. It’s much like Apocalypse Now, in that each person must decide whether the mesmerizing journey is enough to make up for the flawed ending. Probably 4.3 stars for me, so I’ll have to go with four, but the first 9/10 is so good, that I ache to rate it higher. Definitely (as all Woolrich is) well worth reading, just be forewarned that Woolrich is not everyone's cup of tea, and may not be yours.

On a technical note, the Kindle version is very poorly edited. I ran across a more than normal and acceptable number of typos for a work this size, which obviously were not in the original published version. It also had some formatting glitches. Nothing serious, but with a crime classic like this, even a flawed one, someone needs to address it for the Kindle version. ( )

Cornell Woolrich's famous novel, on which the acclaimed François Truffaut film was based, was quite a terrific ride up until the denouement. Then, coincidence, extreme contrivance, and dialog reading like Stephen J. Cannell doing his best to write like an early 20th-century bodice-ripper came close to making a disappointment of the whole thing for me. The plot, about a mysterious woman killing several seemingly unconnected men and the police effort to unravel the mystery of her actions, is taut for most of the book, and I would gladly have read more and more of her setting up and then killing a variety of people while the police inch closer to understanding why without ever making huge strides. But the wrap-up, the manipulation of circumstance necessary for the story to resolve in the way Woolrich wanted it to, made me shake my head in disbelief. And Raymond Chandler would have made eight sentences out of the last eight pages. I'll be interested to go back and revisit the Truffaut film, and I've liked the Woolrich I've read, even this except for those final eight or ten pages. This is one of Woolrich's most famous and acclaimed works, I should add, so your mileage may vary, as they say. ( )

¿Qué diabólico ser se esconde tras los negros ropajes que se esfuman después de cada asesinato? Todos los indicios apuntan a una bella dama vestida de negro que va dejando tras de sí un largo rastro de muerte. Pero el detective Wanger no puede permitirse el lujo de creer en fantasma e intentará cazar a la presunta asesina antes de que otros hombres sucumban a sus encantos.