What Do You Do with a Phantom Sailor Suit? A New Note with Some "New" Old Evidence on Cornell Woolrich, the Blackton Sisters and the Infamous Story of the Sex Diary

What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor

What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor

What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor

Early in the Morning

Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor

Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor

Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor

Early in the Morning 

--"Drunken Sailor," Trad. Sea Shanty

Cornell on the left, Bill on the right

The linchpin of Francis Nevins' claim that Cornell Woolrich was a "self-loathing homosexual" is the infamous sailor suit story.  Woolrich had gone out from New York to Los Angeles, California, to write screenplays for Hollywood and there in 1930 at the age of 27 he met 20-year-old Violet Virginia Blackton, who preferred to go by the name Gloria and was nicknamed by her family "Bill."  She was one of two daughters of film director J. Stuart "Commodore" Blackton, her elder half-sister, by a full decade, being Marian Constance Blackton.  Blackton was nicknamed Commodore on account of having been Commodore of the Atlantic Yacht Club when the family, then consisting of himself, his first wife and little Marian, lived in Brooklyn, New York. By 1930, with the onset of the Depression, the Blacktons were a bit on their uppers.

Woolrich vs. Woolrich
on this side Gloria, aka Bill

Young Bill and Cornell eloped on Dec. 6, 1930 but the marriage, which was never consummated, merely lasted, it is variously stated, less than three weeks or perhaps three months, before Cornell flew the coop and moved back to New York, leaving Bill a continent behind him. 

Nearly a half-century later, in 1977, when she was 76-years old, Marian Blackton, now Marian Trimble, was interviewed by Francis Nevins about her sister's marriage; and she produced, according to Nevins, quite a tale to tell. 

According to Nevins in his 1988 biography of Woolrich, Marian told him that Bill had told her that Woolrich had left a diary behind by mistake, in which he detailed having had in California a great many sexual encounters with other men, "in sordid and dreadful detail" (Nevins' words).  

Marian claimed too, according to Nevins, that Woolrich had also kept a sinister locked suitcase under his bed, which curious Bill took a peek into one day when Woolrich left it unlocked--such a careless boy and a curious girl--and found a sailor suit in it.  Horrors! 

Supposedly, according to Bill, according to Marian, according to Nevins, the shy and timid Woolrich, all 122 pounds of him (this is what he weighed according to his 1942 draft registration card), had a habit at night of dressing up in this sailor suit and going cruising for gay sex at the LA docks.  

on this side Cornell

"Clearly," intones Nevins shudderingly, "[Woolrich's] homosexual life was of the most furtive and sordid variety, a side of himself that he despised and was ashamed of, that he could neither accept nor suppress, that he never acknowledged publicly and dropped down the memory hole...."

Wow! This puts a lot of weight on a sex diary and a sailor suit that no one had ever seen, allegedly, besides long-dead Bill and a supposed parade of anonymous gay men.  We have no actual evidence besides this story, ostensibly from Marian and before her Bill, that these things ever existed.  (According to Barry Malzberg, Nevins played only a barely-audible recording of the Marian Trimble interview back to him.)

And the fact that there is no other evidence, or any evidence really, becomes evidence that not only was Woolrich gay but that he was one of those furtive and sordid ones, closeted and self-loathing.  (Yet he kept a diary about it all too!)

Marian, according to Nevins, went on to tell how Bill was brokenhearted by all this but didn't hold any grudges against Woolrich and behaved magnanimously.  "She was still in love with him and she was heartbroken," Nevins quotes Marian as telling him of Bill.  

In 1933, Bill filed in New York to have the marriage annulled, on the grounds that it had never been consummated.   Nevins speculates that the imminent exposure of Woolrich's homosexuality--he just takes it for granted at this point--must have had the author "keyed up and quivering with terror;" but fortunately for him Bill, "a decent person," said nothing about the "true ground for the action."

Bill complained that Con gave
more attention to his typewriter
than he did to her.

I looked into this part of the story when I wrote my Woolrich article in 2022 and found that a lot of Nevins' telling of the affair was flat wrong. Bill actually went to New York in 1932 to launch a stage career and while there the next year brought her annulment suit against Woolrich to a fanfare of national newspaper publicity. 

Bill didn't say Cornell was gay, she said he was a pallid sexless aesthete who could not perform his husbandly duties.  Considering that Woolrich wrote racy Jazz Age novels and romance fiction at the time, this was very damaging to his reputation, besides being personally humiliating.  It became crystal clear that, when it came to the he-man stuff, Cornell was just a pretender.  Nevins in 2010 told radio interviewer Leonard Lopate that Bill never did anything to embarrass Woolrich during the annulment, a claim, as we have seen, which simply could not be more incorrect.  

Bill also blithely claimed to the newspapers that she was the one who walked out on him. In the papers she was fawningly portrayed all around as beautiful and physical and dynamic, everything Woolrich was not.  One might be forgiven for thinking that Bill had cynically exploited her marriage with Woolrich to publicize her own stage career (which never went anywhere anyway).  

Woolrich himself pathetically told the newspapers: "We had a terrific fuss and Gloria left me.  I guess she couldn't understand why I was so quiet.  When she left the world fell in upon me just as if there had been an earthquake."  

a pair of strapping happy American sailors
(neither of them Cornell)

This doesn't sound anything at all like Nevins' account, nor Marian's, nor Bill's, nor whoever it was that may originally narrated it.  It's amazing to me that for over four decades, until I published my article at Crimereads, no one had ever unearthed this material from public records.  Instead people just salaciously repeated the same flimsy tittle-tattle as hard fact.  

Here's Thomas C. Renzi, who died at age 71 in 2019, in his 2015 book Cornell Woolrich from Pulp Noir to Film Noir.  He writes that information about Woolrich's supposed homosexuality 

comes from an objective source, Nevins' biographical opus of the author....Woolrich turned out to be a backstreet homosexual....he would dress in a sailor suit and comb the derelict dives and dens of the seedy waterfront for the kind of entertainment he could never find at home.

Stuart Blackton with his son Stuart, Jr. and his big-bowed younger daughter Violet
soon to become Gloria, aka Bill.  Note the boy's sailor suit.

Woolrich pictured in a 1927 
newspaper article when
he went out to Hollywood.
Said the interviewer of him:
"He was so boyish we
thought he had sent down a
younger brother to say that
the real Cornell Woolrich 
would be down in a minute."

Then there's Eddie Muller, 67, in his introduction to Open Road's 2020 reprint of one of Woolrich's finest crime novels, The Bride Wore Black:

Woolrich was a compulsive liar, always rewriting facts to tell a better story.  We do know, thanks to Nevins' research, that Woolrich was a self-loathing gay man whose lifelong residency in a locked closet no doubt contributed to the secrecy and paranoia which drips from the stories.  

At least Muller varies the take slightly by calling Woolrich a "self-loathing gay man" rather than a "self-loathing homosexual" but Nevins, 83, and Renzi, who would be 78 were he alive today, evidently could never bring themselves to utter the word gay in their writing. 

Instead it's always the very clinical homosexual, punctuated with very disapproving phrases like "backstreet homosexual," which sound like they come out of one of those scarifying antigay Fifties high school "educational" films.  

The notion that Nevins is an objective source for all this is questionable.  As early as 1971, six years before he interviewed Marian Trimble and extracted the diary and suitcase stories, evidently, Nevins had already proclaimed that Woolrich was "obsessed with the fear that he was homosexual."  

Where did Nevins get the facts for that claim in 1971, three years after Woolrich's death?  I have no idea.  All I know is that Nevins has been hugely attached to this theory for at least 55 years, practically the whole of my own lifetime.  He also has applied it as the explanation for other gay crime writers' problems. Maybe this is as much or more about Nevins as it is Woolrich.  

Marian Blackton in 1922
at age 21

Whatever his motivation Nevins certainly has established none of these contentions as "fact."  Contrary to what Muller wrote, we don't "know" that the author was a self-loathing gay man who lived his life in a locked closet.  We don't know what his sexuality was.  He could have been gay, straight, bisexual or asexual--pay your money and take your chance.  

We do know that Woolrich had a mother fixation and trouble relating with strangers.  And he does seem to have had considerable self-esteem issues and possibly a masochistic streak. But the homosexuality stuff has always been speculative, nailed down by absolute hearsay which never should have been trotted out as factual.  It's as substantial as the vaporous claim that J. Edgar Hoover was a cross dresser.  It would be quite plausible to me that Woolrich never had sex with anyone.  

But here's another interesting new "fact"--and it is a fact.  Eight years after her interview with Nevins, Marian Trimble published a biography of her father in 1985, when she was 84 years old.  And in it there's a page about her sister Bill and Cornell's marriage!  I have known about the existence of this book for four years but only recently was able to get my hands on a copy of it.  I'm going to quote the entirely of the Bill-Cornell passage:

speaking of "sailors"
Commodore Blackton
a pioneering filmmaker and
the father of Marian and Violet, 
aka Gloria, aka Bill

Bill (Gloria) was the first to break away from our gay [family] quintette.  To our utter astonishment, and quite without need to do so, she eloped with Cornell Woolrich, a sandy-haired, impecunious young writer from New York.  Some bright agent had sold him across the Continent as New York's brightest gift to Hollywood. Cornell didn't think this was so, and presently demonstrated his conviction.  He flopped quietly and completely.  

Lean, hungrier looking than Cassius, Mr. Woolrich enslaved Bill's mother-complexed emotions within the first hour of their meeting.  And one day came the wire, "Bill and I have taken the plunge hand in hand," signed Cornell.  

When the apprehensive couple returned from the honeymoon trip, to stand, hand in hand, awaiting the family reproof, they were greeted with a few, quiet, amiable words from my father and an absent-minded "Oh hello" from T. [her brother] and me.  Then everybody went on as if nothing had happened.  

This was in September.  Just before Christmas Cornell eloped again, this time all by himself, leaving Bill to clutch at the furniture and make hideous sobbing sounds whenever the radio played "Body and Soul" or "I Surrender, Dear," which, in 1931, was practically all the time.

the Commodore
and his daughter Marian

My father and I made inept, inarticulate attempts to ease Bill's agony.  She was not to be consoled.  For fully six weeks Bill never got over it.  When, at last, Mr. Woolrich explained to her by phone that it had all been a terrible mistake, Bill made him a dignified farewell.  She then went out and bought a new shade of eyeshadow, a gesture we all applauded as a sign that the the worst had passed and we could now safely hear the two current hit songs through to the end.

That's it, just under 300 words devoted to the matter which so preoccupied Nevins and his followers.  Some of the facts are discernably wrong, like Marian's statement that Bill and Cornell eloped in September.  The documentary record clearly states it was December 6, 1930.  If the couple really parted before Christmas, the two lived together for less than three weeks.  This would seem to comport with the idea that Cornell realized he would not be able actually to have sex with Bill.  (Three months, conversely, seems a long time for that realization to dawn.)  

"I Surrender, Dear," a big Bing Crosby hit, was not released until February 5, 1931, so it doesn't seem like Bill would have been sobbing wildly to that tune in the weeks following their breakup.  

By the way, the lyrics to this song run 

"I may seem proud/And I may act gay/That's just a pose/I'm not that way."  Words for the wise.  

Woolrich came out to Hollywood in 1927 because his second youthful novel, Children of the Ritz, published when he was just 24 years old, won a $10,000 prize and was optioned by a film studio, but Marian does not credit him with that.  The tone she adopts toward him is sardonic and more than a bit contemptuous. What she does NOT talk about is Cornell Woolrich being gay, the sailor suit or the sex diary.  So what we are left with is what Nevins stated she said to him back in 1977.  

the first film adapted from a Woolrich novel

The truth is we don't know that this phantom diary and cruising sailor suit ever existed, even though when Nevins spoke with Leonard Lopate, he stated that Bill returned the diary to Woolrich and declared that he destroyed it.  This is actually what we call assumptions.  And we all know that when you assume, you make an ass u me.  

By phone I talked to writer Anthony Slide, who prepared Marian's manuscript for book publication 41 years ago, and he told me that he didn't cut anything from her Woolrich account, certainly not anything about sex diaries and sailor suits.  Much to the contrary, he says he would certainly have left such material in.  

So why didn't Marian talk about any of this in her book like she apparently did with Nevins?  Is it possible she was simply fancifying to Nevins?  Or that Bill was fancifying to her?  We just can't know at this point.  But Bill, even according to her own half-sister, was not the most stable and reliable of persons herself.  

Certainly Bill Blackton had a flair for the dramatic. After breaking up with Cornell, she took up enthusiastically with a rail-thin carnival "premature burial hypnotist" named Rudy--evidently big-boned Bill had a pash for scrawny men--who wanted to put her under a trance and bury her in a coffin six feet underground. Happily for Bill's future existence in the material world, the city police stepped in at that point.  (Interestingly, one of Cornell Woolrich's suspense tales drew upon this general subject.)

On the phone with me tonight Anthony Slide described the Blackton family as "pretty weird."  Only the brother was a "solid citizen," according to Marian, who herself was bisexual and had a later-in-life intimate relationship with Margerie Bonner, widow of novelist Malcolm Lowry.  

now here are some gay sailors

Cornell was pretty weird too, to be sure.  But was he a "self-loathing homosexual"?  There is no way anyone can responsibly state this as a fact, or even a likelihood, though people have been insisting on it for forty years.  

Cornell was frequently self-loathing and a sad mess in many ways, yes. In my opinion his problems, going all the way back to his neglected childhood, went far beyond any sexuality he may have had.  As an adult his encounter with the flaky Bill was, for him, epochal, because it exposed him, an exceedingly emotionally fragile person, to national humiliation as a pathetic sexless eunuch; and he never recovered from this degradation. 

Afterward he lived an apartment-bound, isolated existence, for nearly three decades with his doting mother, then, after her death, for another decade alone in ever-increasing squalor. He was agoraphobic and anemic and paranoid and mother fixated, for sure, probably masochistic too.  (That certainly shows up in his writing.)  Whether he was actually gay is a mystery.  Don't let that phantom sailor suit of the last four decades bemuse you.  

Arkenshaw Annals: And Shame the Devil (1967) and Serpent's Tooth (1971), by Sara Woods

first American edition
reprinted by Dell

One thing I enjoy about Sara Woods is how she varied her London settings with more than occasional jaunts to Yorkshire, taking her brilliant barrister-sleuth Antony Maitland up north to her own native ground, where she was born in 1916 and after the Great War grew up into adulthood in the 1920s and 1930s.  In 1967 in the detective novel And Shame the Devil, she introduced to her loyal readers the city of Arkenshaw, "one of the smoke-grimed industrial cities of the West Riding."  

Here the author takes on what was then, and is again now, a very topical issue: immigration from Asia to the United Kingdom.  In the 1960s, after the partition of India in 1947, Pakistani immigration to the UK increased hugely, as demand for labor in Britain rose.  In just the five years between 1961 and 1966, the British Pakistani population nearly sextupled, up to around 120,000.  

By no means all of the native British population was pleased with this, despite the fact that Pakistanis provided vital labor in the textile mills, the medical services and transportation industries and other areas.  Sara Woods tackles this unease in Devil, where Antony Maitland defends a pair of British policeman, Sergeant Duckett and Constable Ryder, from the charge of having wrongfully arrested two Pakistani immigrants for burglary.  Duckett is known to have nativistic attitudes, but, Antony Maitland decides, as is his wont, that something more complex is going on in his latest case.  

Devil is one of Sara Woods' finest criminal concoctions, with strong local color and good characterization (Duckett's stern astrology enthusiast grandmother is a particular delight) and a strongly plotted mystery that keeps you reading on.  The climax, which involves a deadly confrontation during a choral performance of Handel's Messiah, is inspired and makes one long for a television adaptation.  Murder fanciers, don't fret, a murder takes place late in the book and an older one is uncovered.  

As an aside, I can't help thinking how well the Maitland books would televise.  I'm sure fans would love to see screen incarnations of recurring print characters like Maitland himself, his uncle Nicholas Harding, his wife Jenny, his colleague Vera Langhorne, his police friends and adversaries like Inspectors Sykes and Briggs, stage actress Meg Hamilton, her husband Roger Farrell and others.  Devil definitely would be one of my recommendations for filming early on.  

I have no idea how Sara Woods derived inspiration for the name Arkenshaw.  I see he is a character in the card game Magic but that could not have been it, as these books long predated it.    

British edition

Whatever the inspiration, Woods obviously loved this setting she had devised with Arkenshaw.  In a 1972 Canadian newspaper interview she proclaimed Devil her favorite among her then fifteen plus books.  The year before she had returned Antony to Arkenshaw in another fine tale, Serpent's Tooth, in which Antony defends a seventeen-year-old boy charged with the murder of his foster father.  

It's a highly classic murder--the man was violently done in behind a closed door with a poker in the living room--but this is a detective story that never would have been written in the Golden Age of detective fiction.  The characters are too humble, for one thing.  

The foster parents, a Catholic couple by the name of Baker, are locally famous for having taken in thirteen foster children--now, at the time of Joe's trial, ages 3 to 19.  Everyone agrees the Bakers are wonderful people, so the question for Antony becomes, why did Joe--who has confessed his guilt--do it?  Joe himself isn't saying.  The answer to this mystery is held closely for most of the novel.  

Tooth is much shorter than Devil--my estimate is some 50,000 words vs. some 90,000 words)--but sparer as it is, it still makes an impact.  Woods brings back some of the characters from Devil and introduces some good new ones, like the mother superior of the local convent school.  (Woods, a Catholic, went to one such institution herself.)  I know that Antony Maitland had at least two additional cases set in Arkenshaw; I hope they both are as good as these two.

And Shame the Devil is being reprinted this year and Serpent's Tooth in 2027.

Dark Indeed! A Recent Blog Notice of My Book Nothing Darker Than the Night (2025), with a Consideration of My Cornell Woolrich Criticism

Last month--incidentally Pride Month--crime fiction author and leading critic Martin Edwards found space on his blog to give two sentences of about 100 words over to a consideration of my essay collection Nothing Darker Than the Night, which was published nearly a year ago in 2025.  

Here's the full notice at Martin's blog:

I'd also like to squeeze in a mention of another worthwhile Stark House Press title, Nothing Darker Than the Night, which focuses on hardboiled and noir fiction and collects essays by Curtis Evans that have appeared elsewhere in the past. Many of the authors featured, such as Hammett, Chandler and Woolrich, have been discussed extensively by leading critics, and the absence of an index is a shame, but it's good to see pieces about such writers as Fredric Brown, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, and Edna Sherry, all of whose novels novels I find very interesting, and all of whom deserve to be remembered.

It's good to see a book of mine get a review notice, however brief, that deems the book "worthwhile" and I agree with Martin of course that writers like Brown, Holding and Sherry deserve to be remembered (it's why I wrote about them), but I was a little puzzled by the position that Martin seems to have adopted, at least in my case, that writers who "have been extensively discussed extensively by leading critics" need not be discussed anymore by subsequent critics, leading or otherwise (or, some might dare say, scholars).  

Ironically, Fredric Brown does have a leading critic, his biographer Jack Seabrook, and Jack has been very kind about my own substantial essay on Brown's life, in which I detailed a great deal of new information about the author.  At Crimereads Jack commented about my essay: "This is an outstanding piece of scholarship that makes for fascinating reading!"  

Certainly the position I outline above--that one need not write about authors already much-discussed by leading critics--has been one that Martin has declined to adopt regarding his own work, which contains a great deal of entertaining and informative opining from him on famous, much previously discussed writers, like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, for example.  To his credit, Martin, with whom I have discussed these matters for some 25 years now (though very little in the last decade), never automatically deferred to leading critics, even ones whose writing he grew up with and whom he patently admired, like Julian Symons.  I think Martin might even have discussed, rather less unorthodoxly, Hammett, Chandler and Woolrich in a certain book of his from this decade.  

In my case I brought both original thought and research to my work on such writers as Hammett, Chandler, Woolrich, Ross Macdonald and Patricia Highsmith (much of which preceded Martin's own).  Reading Martin's notice, I had to wonder whether he had actually yet read any of these essays on them.  If he does read them someday, I think it's possible he might find some of them interesting.  I'll list a few of the things I do with them here.

I look into the life of the woman, Elise De Viane, who brought and won an assault case against Dashiell Hammett.  Poor Elise's claims have tended to get swept under the rug by "leading critics."  I gave a portrait, for the first time, of this shunned woman.  

I analyze Dashiell Hammett's Op Tales as true detective fiction, definitely not an interest of "leading critics."  

I look at the this history of American violence that informed Hammett's fiction, specifically Red Harvest, citing many specific cases.  Kevin Burton Smith linked  my article at this Thrilling Detective website, saying "Curtis Evans gets his hands bloody, tracking the possible inspirations for Hammett's first novel."  

With Chandler, I take a revisionist stance of his criticism of English detective fiction.  This essay has received a lot of favorable commentary over the years and certainly challenges the received wisdom of his "leading critics."  I provide very in-depth analysis of Chandler's literary feud with Ross Macdonald and his illuminating correspondence with minor mystery writer James M. Fox.  Again, these were pieces that received much favorable attention when published in their original form at the website Crimereads.  Of my Chandler-Macdonald piece, Macdonald's biographer, Tom Nolan, a fine man with whom I have dealt and surely one of those leading critics to whom Martin refers, left a comment thanking me for my "fine article."

I could go on--I won't say anything about how I think the pieces are well-written and entertaining, how immodest that would be of me--but I want to get to what I think is the nub of the matter here, which I suspect is my revisionist take on Cornell Woolrich and criticism of Francis Nevins' 1988 Woolrich biography, First You Dream, Then You Die, now nearly forty years old.  

Cornell Woolrich at age 21 in 1925
He went though a lot of mental anguish
before he launched his crime writing 
career nearly a decade later.

Concerning Woolrich and Nevins, who have been linked in people's minds for decades, and himself Martin in 2021 nostalgically recalled: 

I discovered Cornell Woolrich in the 1980s when many of his books were published in paperback with insightful introductions by Francis M. Nevins.  I became a real fan and when Mike Nevins published Woolrich's biography I also devoured that.  Two years ago, at [the] Bouchercon I had the pleasure of meeting Mike Nevins at long last and took the chance to thank him for helping to enthuse me about Woolrich.  

So Nevins is all bound up in Martin's nostalgia about a younger Martin, pushing thirty and discovering noir crime fiction. It's kind of like me and John Dickson Carr and his biographer, my friend Doug Greene, in the 1990s.  

To be sure, I'm younger than Martin but I remember those Woolrich books too, specifically those editions--to be honest the evocative cover illustrations have lingered with me more favorably than the introductions--but I certainly can't say I hungrily "devoured" Nevins' biography of Woolrich, which, whatever its merits, is one of the most indigestible doorstop books I have ever read. (Confession: My own essay collection is 424 pages and has 48 essays, reviews and articles, in case you wondered, so I can understand why a reviewer might find it daunting.)  

I wrote about the above, among many other matters, in my 2022 Woolrich essay at Crimereads, which appears, in even more expanded form, in my book:

One of those old Eighties
Ballantine editions

Ironically there is comparatively little personal detail about Cornell Woolrich [in the biography], especially given the mammoth size of the book (613 pages of smallish type, including a microscopically printed index).  Most of Dream...is given over to minute detail on almost every piece of fiction Woolrich ever wrote, as well as the numerous film, radio and television adaptations that have been made from his work, with the result that what information is provided on Woolrich's life is dully buried in the dead weight of bibliographical data and plot summaries.  Much of Nevins' influence on the general public's perception of Cornell Woolrich probably can be traced more directly to the introductions he contributed, beginning in 1971, three years after the authors death, to myriad Woolrich short fiction anthologies and novel reprints (particularly publisher Ballantine's lauded early Eighties paperback reissues, the moody cover art for which, rendered by Larry Schwinger, recalls the haunting isolation of painter Edward Hopper's urban art, especially his 1942 painting Nighthawks). 

As blogger Lucynka has noted of Nevins' book:

it is a slog (600+ pages, and most of that is story summaries, not legitimate biographical information, and worse yet, there's no clear distinction between the two.  Do I really want to read a 10-page summary of Woolrich's first novel--thereby spoiling every single plot point for myself--just so I can cobble together a mere paragraph's worth of personal information?) 

Crucially and to his credit Nevins was able to provide us with interviews with contemporaries of Woolrich, but primary research in newspapers, census records and other data was sorely lacking.  Disappointingly, there is also little surviving personal correspondence from Woolrich.  

It really would make a fine doorstop.

Perhaps somewhat uncharitably the late sci-fi writer Barry N. Malzberg, who met and admired Woolrich, backhandedly referred to Nevins' book as "bibliographically useful."  To me Barry referred to Nevins' book as a bibliography, not a biography.  

What Nevins did accomplish, when it came to getting into the life and psyche of Woolrich, is establish what on my blog in 2014 I called the "black legend" of Woolrich as a miserable, rotten, self-hating, mother-obsessed, closet queer.  Malzberg bluntly termed this treatment Nevins' "incessant fag-baiting,"  asserting that Woolrich's biographer regarded and treated homosexuality as a "pathological condition."  

It's not an exaggeration to say that although Nevins loves much of Woolrich's work (while also ridiculing a fair chunk of it), he loathes the man himself and seemingly derives enjoyment from mocking him.  At the cool lima bean blog, Jeff Powanda has avowed: "I can't recall another biography in which it's been so apparent that the author had complete contempt for his subject."

In my Woolrich essay I have documented the gleeful zest with which Nevins often ridicules Woolrich.  I find it a strange attitude in a biographer.  I'm rather reminded of the old Charles Atlas comic book ads of the beach bully kicking sand at the 98-pound weakling.  And a dead one at that, who can not even attempt to defend himself.  

As I looked at the "evidence" which Nevins provided for his thesis I was unpersuaded.  Indeed I became appalled that "leading critics" for decades had been proclaiming what I deemed an essentially rather speculative homophobic line of argument as factual.  I methodically tested Nevins' narrative and provided my own researched counter take in my essay.  I also established, I think, that Nevins' literary analysis of Woolrich's alleged self-hating homosexuality was astoundingly puerile.  Surely this wasn't what impressed Martin when he "devoured" the book nearly four decades ago.  

Blogger Lucynka wrote here, coincidentally just four days before my Woolrich essay was published: "Francis Nevins, author of the 1988 Woolrich biography, seems convinced he was homosexual (and seemingly everyone since then has echoed/exaggerated this theory, such that you now see it stated as ABSOLUTE FACT)....I gotta say...I'm not really picking up on any queer vibes...."

My Woolrich piece became one of Crimereads' most read and discussed essays and to date has generated over forty comments, only one of which, mere invective, was critical of me.  Today on Google's search engine it is the fifth hit for the term "Cornell Woolrich," after Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon and Goodreads.  Meanwhile Nevins' book has, I believe, been out-of-print since the 1990s.  It frankly astonished me that Martin could implicitly dismiss this essay as unneeded because a "leading critic" had already written extensively about Woolrich.  It's precisely because of that critic that my own piece needed to be written.  Maybe Martin hasn't read the essay, but many other people have, including individuals who are at least as notable critics as Nevins.  

About Cornell Woolrich's 
disastrous marriage there
is a difference of opinion.

But it wouldn't be the first time that an older straight boomer has felt comfortable peddling as fact Nevins' really remarkably homophobic views of Woolrich's alleged homosexuality.  This aspect of it seemingly went by so unnoticed in 1989, the height of the AIDS era, that Nevins' book, published by Otto Penzler's Mysterious Press, was awarded an Edgar, evidently without qualm or controversy, from the Mystery Writers of America.  I like to think of my 2018 Edgar nomination for editing the critical LGBTQ+ essay collection Murder in the Closet as something of an institutional penance for that. Say 69 Hail Marys, MWA!

Despite the entrenched views of some of  the mystery field's leading septuagenarian and octogenarian critics, however, I think I have managed to shift the dialogue with the openminded.  Certainly Barry Malzberg, himself then no youngster, thought highly of my essay, as he told me in email correspondence three years before his death at age 85 in December 2024.  

Out of tact I won't quote his correspondence with me in its entirety but here is part of it:

Dec. 13, 2021

[X] forwarded your brave, thorough, exceedingly welcome work.  Thanks.  I have been waiting for someone to stand with me...it has taken more than a quarter of a century....

Dec. 15, 2021

Brilliantly parsed and transcribed defense of Cornell as a survey of the blasted landscape Nevins left behind.  Harry Harrison wrote me in a different context half a century ago "You can never catch up with a lie." The lie becomes the canon.

But you tried as I did in my small way and maybe there will be a later verdict if humanity survives.

Jan. 10, 2022

Read it carefully, completely, slowly an hour ago. (CRIMEREADS put it online as you know.) It is masterful.  You have performed a great service to humanity....

Jan. 12, 2022

Magnificent job.  Hopeless but the Iliad and for that matter LEAR teach us the grandeur of hopeless causation and its enactment.

These words meant a lot to me, though I try not to share Barry's fatalism about the black legend's imperishable supremacy, despite notices like Martin's which make me wonder.  I agree with Malzberg about "lies" (or shall we say errors) becoming canon, that's why sometimes we really do have to challenge canonical interpretations by "leading critics."  The absolute worst thing we can do, in Woolrich's case, is to say that since Nevins wrote a lot of stuff about him, no one else ever need write about him originally again (except maybe Martin).  

To be sure, Malzberg is not the only person from his generation to have praised me for writing the essay.  Still I place my greatest hope for a more accurate and insightful picture of Woolrich predominating with critics from the younger generation, like Lucynka, whose original feminist approach to the author makes for a much keener analysis of Woolrich's writing than that of his leading critic. That is of course, as Barry wrote, "if humanity survives."

Stop what you're doing!
scene from Cornell Woolrich's "Momentum," televised on Alfred Hitchcock Presents

So please pardon me for thinking that my essays on crime writers "discussed extensively by leading critics" have some value and are at least worth reading.  I think my frequently revisionist body of work has value, just as Martin's does.  Martin may be more tactful and diplomatic than I, but he has done much, as have I, to discredit many of the contentions made by earlier "leading critics" of British crime fiction like Julian Symons.  Sometimes received wisdom needs to be challenged, even if it means stepping on some toes and alienating some people.  

Cornell in the 1950s in his fifties
somewhat worse for wear--or
"wracked by diabetes and alcoholism
and homosexual self-contempt"
as Francis Nevins puts it in those
Ballantine book introductions

I especially appreciated this onsite comment from "Kevin" on my Woolrich essay.  I don't know whether or not he's a "leading critic" but he does seem to know what he's talking about:

This is really fascinating, and I applaud your rigor and doggedness in doing the kind of research that Nevins never bothered with.  As a former physician/psychiatrist, I think your suggestion that Woolrich likely suffered medical issues leading to lifelong anemia is very astute.  I found myself also entertaining a possible diagnosis of schizoid personality disorder.  Most of Woolrich's nature and quirks are consistent with this diagnosis, and people with schizoid personality disorder often evoke distrust and even revulsion in others.  People sometimes find them "creepy" and "unlikeable."  

Good points all, from someone evidently more qualified to expound on this subject than even Woolrich's "leading critic." (Critics! What don't they know?)

Seriously, though, how on earth did we come for decades to delegate to Francis Nevins the last word on the psychological state of Cornell Woolrich? Or so easily come to accept that all his evident mental and physical problems are attributable simply to self-loathing homosexuality? Despite its great length Nevins' biography never with any sophistication whatsoever addresses Woolrich's evident physical and psychological maladies. Magically, "self-hating homosexual" does all the lifting.  

That may be a good enough explanation for Nevins, who took the exact same approach with queer crime writers Patricia Highsmith and Milton Propper, and others who have followed him and perhaps it's good enough for Martin as well, but it shouldn't be good enough for the rest of us.* Good history is a laboratory where we synthesize ideas, not some posh private club of proclaimed higher authorities who brook no further argument.  

*(Get a load of Nevins' insight into the psyche of Patricia Highsmith: "If you think Cornell Woolrich was something of a psychopath and a creep, you don't know the meaning of those words until you've encountered Highsmith.  Both, of course were homosexual.  I gather...that Highsmith...was never terribly comfortable with being a lesbian."  History repeats itself! With queer people, in Nevins' eyes, the problem inevitably seems to be the queerness.)

Woolrich and his other best girl
One thing I can agree with others on is that Cornell had mother issues. 
That happens to men of all sorts however.

In a closing note I'm pleased to announce that Silent as the Grave, Centipede Press' latest high-end collection of Cornell Woolrich short fiction, will be out soon.  I wrote the introduction for the volume, and it's one of the rare times someone has written about Woolrich in a high-profile publication without analyzing everything about him under the self-loathing homosexual lens (a prevalent approach around sixty years ago to gay writers among straight male critics who indeed deemed homosexuality a pathological condition). The original version of the intro can be found here.  (There were some changes in the story content afterward, necessitating revisions.)

I think I manage to get through the whole introductory piece--quite a substantial one--without even referring to that matter.  We can and should do better by the man than the treatment which "leading critics" routinely afforded him for around a half-century, roughly 1970 to 2020.  The black legend needs dilution, giving it more than, to quote a keystone boomer rock band, a touch of gray.  

Book of Tobit: Past Praying For (1968), by Sara Woods

The Book of Tobit is an apocryphal biblical text, still found, so I read, in Catholic Bibles but not Protestant ones, which tells the tale of Tobit, Tobit's son Tobias and Sarah.  On a journey to recover ten silver talents owed to his family Tobias, guided by the archangel Raphael, meets Sarah, who as it happens is rather afflicted with a jealous demon, Asmodeus, in her life.  This dreadful fellow, it seems, has slain Sarah's previous seven husbands (who says seven is a lucky number), but brave Tobias, who is smitten as well with Sarah (she must have been really something), with Raphael's assistance vanquishes demonic Asmodeus and lives happily ever after in wedded bliss with his bride.  Seems like some of the most entertaining parts of the Bible ended up in the Apocrypha!

Wedding of Tobias and Sarah; Raphael Binds the Demon, by Jan Steen, c. 1660

In Past Praying For, the fourteenth of Sarah Woods' Anthony Maitland detective novels, the author seems to have drawn a bit on the Book of Tobit.  Her barrister sleuth Maitland jocularly mentions the story to his uncle, Sir Nicholas Harding, who in 1965, when the novel is primarily set, is defending a certain Camilla Barnard (her maiden name is Spencer!) on the charge of having murdered her second husband.  Beleaguered Camilla has already served four years in prison for having shot to death her prior husband in 1957.  Both her dead husbands were Barnards, second cousins in fact, and members of the family firm, a Yorkshire manufacturer of kitchen and bathroom fixtures.  

Asmodeus
pretty sure this illustration is from the 1980s 
Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual
Traditionally I think that he's portrayed
as rather less human.

Anyway, Uncle Nick is having trouble coming up with a good defense for Camilla, so Antony whimsically suggests pinning the crime on Asmodeus:

"There's always Asmodeus....You might try it on the jury....There was this lass--Sara, I think her name was--and they kept on marrying her off, and every time a devil called Asmodeus killed the bridegroom on his wedding night.  She got through seven perfectly good husbands that way, which I admit seems a trifle excessive."

Antony was involved in Camilla's prosecution eight years earlier and it was his empathetic questioning that actually got Camilla off with a mere four-year sentence. (Her husband Alan apparently was an emotionally and physically abusive adulterer.)  

Camilla then married, on the rebound, Alan's stodgy "safe" second cousin Oliver. Most unfortunately, Oliver has recently died from consuming an arsenic-laden rice pudding prepared by Camilla herself.  Camilla does always seem to be stepping in it, as it were!

Great jacket by Paddington illustrator 
Fred Banbery does justice to a great
Sixties crime novel

Defending Camilla Spencer Barnard (twice over) looks like a tall task indeed, but with Anthony doing detecting behind the scenes, anything is possible.  He's pulled miracles, along with scribbled old envelopes, out of his pocket before in thirteen recorded instances now.

In many ways this is a delightfully traditional detective novel, complete with a floor plan, a family tree, a wealthy old family firm, old family servants and poison in the pudding.  There are questions about just who could have gotten to that rice pudding in the kitchen on the fatal day and Antony's wife Jenny makes a very pertinent point about nutmeg.  I happen to love rice pudding myself and have made it many times, but never with arsenic, let me assure you.  

A highly recommended Sixties detective novel that is being reprinted, along with four other Sixties Sara Woods this year, by Dean Street Press.  Read it!

my recent rice pudding, some nutmeg already added before cooking
No arsenic, guv'nor, I swear!

Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered: Witch's Moon (1941), by Giles Jackson (aka Dana Chambers, aka Albert Fear Leffingwell)

"Whoever likes [their] murders multitudinous will find them here....[There's a] plethoric flow of gore short [only] of Nazi warfare."

--"How the Blood Runs!" Review of Witch's Moon in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 28, 1941

First American edition
Two paperback editions followed, 
one with the title changed to,
alliteratively but rather ridiculously,  
Blood on the Blonde

Between 1939 and 1947 former intelligence officer, retired adman and crime writer Albert Fear Leffingwell published 13 crime novels, the last of which appeared posthumously.  Only one of these was published under his own name, with another nine appearing under the pseudonym Dana Chambers and a pair under the pseudonym Giles Jackson. Seven of the ten Dana Chambers novels were series tales about amateur sleuth Jim Steele, a gent with the most hardboiled detective name this side of Mike Hammer (though he wasn't one), while the remaining three were non-series.  

The Jim Steele novels are currently being reprinted by Stark House as twofer volumes (though there will be an odd book out).  I just wrote the introduction to She'll Be Dead By Morning/The Blonde Died First, which will be out later this year.  The first volume, to which I also wrote an introduction, pairs Someday I'll Kill You with Too Like the Lightning and is available here.

the author's grandmother
Jane Elizabeth Jackson Leffingwell 
who died at age 90 in 1907 when her 
grandson was 12

The first of the two Giles Jackson novels, Witch's Moon, is forthcoming.  (Both Moon and its successor, Court of Shadows, feature as series sleuth New York newsman Nile Boyd.)  

Although the author's mother, Elizabeth Fear, had English immigrant parents, the ancestry of his father, Albert Tracy Leffingwell, went back many generations into the New England states of Connecticut and Massachusetts. Almost inevitably, it seems, he was a Mayflower descendant. His paternal  grandmother, Jane Elizabeth Jackson, was a granddaughter of Giles Jackson of Tyringham, Massachusetts, a locally renowned Revolutionary War veteran--though the claim of his family that he served as General Horatio Gates' chief of staff at the Battle of Saratoga seems not to be true.  In retirement the good gentleman sired nineteen children.  

social reformer James Caleb Jackson
the author's great-uncle

Jane Jackson Leffingwell's brother, James Caleb Jackson, the author's great-uncle, was a noted abolitionist and vegetarian who is credited with inventing the first dry breakfast cereal, Granula, in 1863.  Jackson forced a rival food faddist, a certain James Harvey Kellogg, to stop using the name Granula for his breakfast food, alleging Kellogg had stolen it from him.  Kellogg then coined the name Granola.  

Jackson was a prolific reformist writer, authoring such deadly serious, earnest tomes as The Sexual Organism and Its Healthful Management, How to Treat the Sick without Medicine (Shades of MAHA!), Dancing: Its Evil and Benefits, and American Womanhood: Its Peculiarities and Necessities.  

In 1858 he also founded the Jackson Sanatorium, a hydrotherapeutic resort, in Dansville, New York, which became for many decades a lucrative family business.  

Scenic ruins of the main building
of the Jackson Sanatorium, or the Castle on the Hill
as it is locally known today

Albert Tracy Leffingwell
the author's social reformer father

James Caleb Jackson's equally earnest nephew Albert Tracy Leffingwell was also a noted reformer, an anti-vivisectionist and progressive social activist.  Albert's wife, Elizabeth Fear Leffingwell, daughter of a Wesleyan Methodist lay preacher and coal miner who was killed by a hurtling train of runaway mining cars, was a pioneering female gynecologist.  

The brilliant couple's eldest son, the crime writer Albert Fear Leffingwell (back to him again), was proud of his distinguished family ancestry and expressed a certain left-wing sensibility in his writing--his sleuth James Steele fought on behalf of the Republicans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War--though he did not share their piety.  

To the contrary, Albert Fear Leffingwell lived a life that in some of its aspects his more puritanical New England ancestors would have frowned upon, one suspects.  Initially his life course ran highly commendably, at least on the surface.  After graduating from Harvard at the age of twenty-two, Leffingwell served in army intelligence in the First World War.  Upon leaving the service in 1919 he wed Helen Lillian Urie, daughter of an attorney, and with her had two daughters. 

the author and his wife in 1924, when he was 29

In 1925 he co-founded the poshly named New York advertising firm of Olmsted, Perrin and Leffingwell, which four years later was most profitably merged into the firm McCann, now the massive global advertising network McCann Erickson.  In the 1930s, before he had even commenced his later-in-life writing career, Leffingwell was drawing an estimated income, in modern worth, of some $362,000 a year.  He resided with his wife and young daughters at the family home in Bronxville, an affluent suburb about twenty miles north of Manhattan.

In 1935, however, this placid facade was ripped apart when Helen Urie Leffingwell brought a separation suit against Albert, alleging, as newspapers wryly reported, that he had abandoned his family on the advice of a meddling psychoanalyst who had informed him that his family "cramped his style."  Helen remained with the girls at the Bronxville home while Alfred took up residence at the Park Hotel in the Connecticut town of Winstead, located in the Connecticut Berkshires, about 38 miles from Tyringham, Massachusetts, the abode of his heroic Revolutionary War great-great grandfather, Giles Jackson. There he commenced the writing of crime fiction.  He was divorced from Helen by 1940 and never remarried in the six years of life left to him.

the author at time he was writing crime fiction

In 1939, the same year in which Raymond Chandler introduced to the world tough guy detective Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, Leffingwell commenced the investigative saga of Jim Steele with a pair of crime novels, Some Day I'll Kill You and Too Like the Lightning.  Five more Jim Steele mysteries would follow between 1940 and 1946, the year of the author's untimely death at the age of fifty-one.  He had battled a drinking problem for over 25 years and died from kidney disease at a hospital in New Haven, Connecticut.  

In 1940 the author published only one novel, a Jim Steele mystery called She'll Be Dead By Morning, but in 1941 there came from his busy hand no fewer than three crime tales: 

The Blonde Died First (Dana Chambers)

Witch's Moon (Giles Jackson) 

Nine Against New York (the only novel he ever published under his own name)

Witch's Moon would be followed in 1943 by another novel with the same amateur sleuth, Court of Shadows.  Obviously Leffingwell derived the Giles Jackson pen name from his revolutionary was ancestor Giles Jackson, whom the Jackson clan revered.  

While Court of Shadows was a timely World War Two spy thriller, Witch's Moon is something of a madcap couples mystery, albeit with no fewer than four murders, two of them quite gory.  Considering it takes place over one late night and early morning, that's an impressive tally indeed.  

Park Hotel, Winstead, CT, demolished in 1960s, where the author wrote Witch's Moon

When the tale opens, New York crime reporter Nile Boyd and fashion writer Anne Warriner are nearing the town of Oldfield, Connecticut, where they will stay overnight at the Lake Hotel--"Cachet of respectability.  Apotheosis of New England virtue," as Anne puts it (rather ironically as things turn out).  They were going to stay at Anne's lake place, but her cook can't make it till tomorrow, you see.  "I can't spend the night alone with you in a lake cottage, you ass," Anne bluntly explains to her semi-boyfriend.  "The whole town would be up bright and early tomorrow cutting out scarlet letters."  

From the novel:
"A copy of the Ladies Home Journal
for August, 1938 lay face down
in front of the fireplace."

Surprisingly the Lake Hotel proves to have quite a collection of dipsos and other assorted quirky characters, male and female.  One of the guests gets her throat cut in her room, while another unaccountably vanishes and a man, identify unknown, takes a fatal tumble from the porch roof.  And this is just in the first few hours!  

Nile helps the state troopers investigate, on account of his familiarity with the New York police.  You remember the "Rauber case...one of the most famous--and sickening--kidnaping cases in police history"?  It seems Nile "found the body."

The tough newsman will solve this case by sunset, but not until after much mayhem has ensued, including a fatal shooting and the discovery of...well, you'll be able to see soon enough, I expect, for yourself.  There is a lot going on in this book, and it switches viewpoints with some frequency; but things never get unduly murky.  

Through his characters more potshots are taken against local puritanical mores by the author, of whom I have gathered in his own life had replaced Christianity with psychology, Saint Paul with Sigmund Freud and the Bible with Psychopathia Sexualis.  

A local lawyer is said to have the suspicious, subversive habit of reading books, particularly tomes of Freudian psychology.  "Real books," emphatically adds local mathematics teacher Mary West. "[T]hat's a habit no one in Oldfield understands or condones."

Granula, the original American "granola" 
though apparently it looked more like grape nuts

Only some 43,000 words, this novel moves fast as a freight train toward its surprising end.  I thought it quite entertaining, as reviewers of the time did as well.  "Fast-moving, humorous and satisfactorily baffling," declared the Chicago Tribune.  Huzzahed the Birmingham News: "'Witches Moon' is a pleasant relief from the old stock stories written in the same dull way.  Giles Jackson has plotted a fascinating murder mystery and has written it in a way to hold the attention of the most jaded reader.  This is a thriller you shouldn't miss."

In Australia the Goulburn Evening Post called the novel a "breathless and exciting thriller written in an original and engaging style."  To put it in a way the author's virtuous ancestors might have appreciated: 

"Witch's Moon--It's even better than a bowl of granula!" 

Appendix: A Leffingwell-Jackson Family Album

early 1840s naive painting of the young, beardless and righteous James Caleb Jackson
showing him holding a copy of the abolitionist newspaper
The Liberty Press of Utica, New York, which he edited

James Caleb Jackson, age 39 and still beardless,
at the 1850 Fugitive Slave Convention, which had been held
to protest the recently passed Fugitive Slave Act
Among other things the Act denied accused runaways legal due process.
Over fifty fugitives attended the convention.  Note Frederick Douglass, 
two places over from James Caleb Jackson on the left

gravestone of Deacon John Jackson, a remote ancestor

James Caleb Jackson and his saintly wife Lucretia,
known as "Mother Jackson"

James and Lucretia's handsome but sickly elder son
Giles Elderkin Jackson 
who died tragically at age 28 in 1864,
a year after his father invented granula.
First cousin once removed of the author.
Today a Jackson descendant, James M. Jackson,
uses Giles Elderkin as a mystery-writing pseudonym

gravestone of Thomas Leffingwell
who around 1675 built the Leffingwell Inn in 
Norwich, Connecticut (see below)

Leffingwell House, started as an inn by Thomas Leffingwell
His grandson Christopher Leffingwell, a member of the
Sons of Liberty and owner of paper and chocolate mills,
corresponded with George Washington during the Revolution.

the author's mother a pioneering woman gynecologist
and devoted parent who took her
three teenaged boys on a tour of Europe

Leffingwell home in Aurora, New York
where the author grew up, 52 miles from Dansville
as the crow flies

Jackson Sanatorium

Dana Jackson Leffingwell, the youngest brother of the author
a Cornell graduate and a professor of zoology and ornithologist
who tragically died of pneumonia in 1930 and the age of 28

the author, third from left,
at Soames School 1910/11, either 15 or 16
this is the author's own handwriting 

the author at Harvard