A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

I Married a Dead Man (1948)

Strangler’s Serenade (1951)

As George Hopley

Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945)

Fright (1950)

Films Based on Woolrich works

Convicted (1938) (story Face Work)

Street of Chance (1942) (novel The Black Curtain)

The Leopard Man (1943) (novel Black Alibi)

Phantom Lady (1944) (novel)

The Mark of the Whistler (1944) (story Dormant Account)

Deadline at Dawn (1946) (novel)

Black Angel (1946) (novel)

The Chase (1946) (novel The Black Path of Fear)

Fall Guy (1947) (story Cocaine)

The Guilty (1947) (story He Looked Like Murder)

Fear in the Night (1947) (story Nightmare)

The Return of the Whistler (1948) (story All at Once, No Alice)

I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948) (story)

Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948) (novel)

The Window (1949) (story The Boy Cried Murder)

No Man of Her Own (1950) (novel I Married a Dead Man)

El Pendiente (1951) (story The Death Stone)

Si muero antes de despertar (1952) (story If I Should Die Before I Wake)

No abras nunca esa puerta (1952)

(stories: Somebody on the Phone/Humming Bird Comes Home)

Rear Window (1954) (story It Had to Be Murder)

Rear Window (1998) (story It Had to Be Murder)

Obsession (1954) (story Silent as the Grave)

Nightmare (1956) (story)

The Bride Wore Black (1968) (novel)

Mississippi Mermaid (1969) (novel Waltz Into Darkness)

Kati Patang (1970) (novel I Married a Dead Man)

Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972) (novel Rendezvous in Black)

Union City (1980) (story The Corpse Next Door)

I Married a Shadow (1983) (novel I Married a Dead Man)

Cloak & Dagger (1984) (story The Boy Who Cried Murder)

Mrs. Winterbourne (1996) (story I Married a Dead Man)

Original Sin (2001) (novel Waltz Into Darkness)

Four O’Clock (2006) (story Three O’Clock)

Dance It Off!

Wally Walters had been told more than once that he was a cake eater. Now a cake eater is one who having arrived at years of discretion toils not neither does he spin. In other words he lets the bread and butter of life go by him and concentrates on the cake — sugar icing and all. How he gets away with it is nobody’s business. But Wally Walters, in particular, wore a three-cornered, low-crowned hat down over his eyes and nose with a little green feather stuck in the band. Being unable to fasten a bow-tie himself, he wore his on a rubber band under the collar of his shirt. It looked just as good anyway. His trousers hung about his legs in folds; they extended to the tips of his shoes, and when he walked he looked elephant-footed. The funniest thing about him, though, was his raincoat. When it rained, and sometimes even when it didn’t rain, Wally came out in a soapy looking yellow slicker with a little strap around his throat like a dog-collar. On his back he had a drawing of a bobbed-haired flapper in a pink chemise and black silk stockings, and underneath was the legend “Ain’t we got fun” for all the townspeople to marvel at. The blonde cashier at the candy store had done it for him. She had also done some six or eight others. All the boys told her she had a great deal of talent going to waste. She agreed with them.

It is only fair to mention in passing that although Wally Walters was undeniably a cake eater, he never touched cake, or pie either for that matter. He dined in cafeterias whenever he did dine, which wasn’t as often as it sounds, and he ate things like ham sandwiches and custards because they cost less and were far more substantial. Several evenings a week he devoted to billiards, but on Saturday nights he was always to be found at the Rainbow, the local dance center, where they took the precaution of searching you for liquor as you went in. Some of the brighter ones got around this by carrying it internally. On Saturday nights Myrtle and Rose and Lily were always to be found there, outdoing one another in the grotesqueries of the Charleston. All that was needed was plenty of room, a pair of strong ankles, and lots of terpsichorean ambition; and these were the very things that Wally Walters seemed to have most of. Consequently he was a howling success and always in demand — as Rose and Myrtle and Lily thought that the cleverest Charleston contortionist was bound to make an ideal husband, in which case they wouldn’t have to go out any more but could do their practicing right at home.

But not for Wally. He knew too much about girls. Girls were a necessary evil, nice under Japanese lanterns at twelve o’clock with all their bagatelles and war-paint on, but not so nice at nine the next morning over the cereal and the coffee pot. Wally was an idealist. He had dreams and he hated to see them spoilt. He got a little older and he got a little older and finally he put his trust in one girl and one girl only, a girl in a castle of dreams.