Driven to desperate ends, Louis finally commits an act in her defense from which there is no return.

When Julia empties out their joint bank account and flees the city, Louis pursues her across the American South with murder in his heart, only to fall back in love with her after they’re reunited in a typically wild Woolrichian coincidence. Louis is soon ensnared-helplessly and willingly-in her web. Petite, blond and lovely, Julia (or Bonny, as her real name may or may not be) is nevertheless the most fatale of femmes. Blinded by love and need, Louis accepts her explanations without question, and ignores those first ominous clues that she’s not what-or who-she claims to be. Louis, in what he calls “the bargain he had made with love, taking what he could get, in sudden desperate haste, for fear of getting nothing at all.”īut when Julia Russell, his bride-to-be, arrives, she looks nothing like the pictures she’s sent, and her stories don’t match what she’s recounted in her letters. He contracts for a mail-order bride from St. Now an affluent businessman at thirty-seven, Louis is nonetheless lonely, lost, and terrified of growing old alone. Fifteen years earlier, his fiancée died of yellow fever on the night before their wedding. All that poor Louis Durand, the novel’s ostensible hero, wants is to love, and be loved. Woolrich’s longest novel, Waltz trades his usual Manhattan nightscapes for the gaslight and cobblestones of 1880 New Orleans. It came near the end of an incredibly prolific period in his creative life-from 1940 to 1950-that saw the publication of eleven classic suspense novels and dozens of short stories. And in that work, there is no better example than Waltz into Darkness.įirst published in 1947, Waltz was written under Woolrich’s William Irish pseudonym, which he had previously used for his novels Phantom Lady and Deadline at Dawn. Nowhere is that truer than in the work of Cornell Woolrich, America’s greatest noir novelist.

The bride wore black cornell woolrich