There wasn't a glint of pity in the stars over him as he came out into the open night and his face dimmed to its secretive shade. There wasn't a breath of tenderness in the human salt breeze that came in from the Gulf. He'd have her alone , and no one should save her. He'd have her death and nothing else would do.
--Cornell Woolrich, Waltz into Darkness (Penzler, 2020; originally published by Lippincott,1947)
Francis M. Nevins, Jr., Woolrich's biographer, refers to the "lunatic excess" of Waltz into Darkness, and also says, " As Woolrich couldn't shake free from his mother's grip, neither can Durand from the grip of la femme fatale." The novel takes place in Louisiana, and other Southern states, in 1880, as coffee tycoon Louis Durand marries a mail order bride. The bride, Julia, turns out to be someone other than who she claims to be, something Durand finds out when she takes all his money and disappears. He tracks her down but when he finds her he falls for her story and falls for her again. Durand kills the private detective who he had hired to find his bride and Durand and Julia go on the run. When Durand runs out of money his wife tries to kill him with rat poison, changing her mind a moment too late.
This rather implausible and full-of-coincidences tale reminds one of Wilkie Collins and of other 19th century writers, including Dickens. Woolrich adds misogyny and misanthropy to the mix and fills out the novel (his longest) with details and descriptions of the weather, the houses and the clothes everyone wears, adding verisimilitude to the nightmarish and passionate plot. Many of Woolrich's stories and novels were made into film noir movies, though Waltz into Darkness was not made into a film until 1969, Mississippi Mermaid, directed by Francois Truffaut, which did not have Woolrich's intense prose to shield it from absurdity.
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