Manhattan Love Song
This 1932 novel presages Woolrich's emergence as a noir star, and it finds him exploring suitably dark relationship themes. Blow past unhappily married narrator Wade's melodramatic first encounter with mobbed-up party girl Bernice Pascal on the pre-Depression Manhattan streets, and the story soon settles into a snappy Jazz Age essay of the many crimes lonely, deluded hearts willingly commit. Although Wade's sardonic jibes and cocky narcissism feel downright contemporary as he obsessively pursues his dangerous dame, Woolrich displays classic descriptive gifts when showing readers a moon looming "like a gilt thumbtack nailing the blue plush carpet that was the sky closer to the floor of heaven," and later, "a natty fellow who looked as though he'd had his clothes poured over him hot, and then allowed to harden." In a new introduction, Francis M. Nevins contends the novel "meant so much to [Woolrich] that he resurrected elements from it several times during his later career." Even if this is a minor work, noir fans will find plenty in it to enjoy.Frank SennettCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved