Just Finished Reading: Fright by Cornell Woolrich (FP: 1950)

Prescott Marshall has a plan. It’s a good plan. It’s a simple plan where nothing can go wrong. He’s young, a man about town, he’s popular a fun to be with and he has a girlfriend with family connections. After they get married he’ll be a member of that family too, her connections will become his clients and the money will start rolling in. It’ll be perfect, it’ll be easy. He has a ring, he has the speech all ready and he’s waiting at the restaurant ready to go…. And the phone rings and the waiter says it’s for him. His girl is in tears, her aunt and uncle have just been killed and she needs to comfort her mother. She hopes he understand. He does and promises to be there for her and her mother whenever they need him. At a loose end he has a drink at the bar, and then another angry at his bad luck. Moving onto another bar and another drink he picks up a woman and then another. Soon the night is a vague memory and he wakes in his bed, in his apartment fortunately alone except for a pounding headache. Getting ready for work there’s a knock on the door and a girl waiting outside. Without being invited she walks in and smiles. Marshall has never seen her before but she knows him alright. About last night, she says. We has a swell time didn’t we, she says. So how about $50 just to cover expenses. Angry at her crude hustle Marshall starts to through her out and then he starts to remember and starts to worry. What if his real girl found out? What if the hustler ruined his plans? Surely $50 is worth it just to get her to leave him alone? Months pass and the young hustler is just a bad memory. It’s the wedding day. The Best Man is on his way and there’s a knock at the door. It’s her again, the hustler. Its $250 this time and a lifetime of blackmail ahead of him, each payment more and more as his fortune grows. There’s only one way out. The only way to make the girl go away – permanently. Before Marshall knows what he’s done the girl is on the floor, dead and the Best Man is knocking. With a body in his bedroom there’s no way Marshall can stay in New York. It’s only a matter of time before the police catch up with him. All of his plans are in tatters. Everything he does, everywhere he goes, and everything he says to everyone he meets needs to be filtered through the memory of that body in that city. He needs to be constantly on alert for strangers asking questions, funny looks, and mention of other women and a host of other things both trivial and profound. He needs to be his guard. Now, always, forever…..

I have a thing, a problem you might say, with the idea of the unreliable narrator. If a story or movie is being narrated and the viewer/reader is being directed in certain ways then it behoves the narrator to be truthful. They can leave gaps for the reader to fill in, they might mislead or misdirect (especially if they’re the villain of the piece) but the actively lie, to fabricate things that do not exist doesn’t sit well with me – especially when you can’t tell if anything in the story actually happened or is the fantasy of a fevered imagination. This is how I felt for well over half the book. I constantly asked myself – did that actually just happen? Is this real? Or is it just paranoia? I must admit it did get rather wearing after a while! The ending didn’t really help as it threw everything I thought I knew about the narrative up in the air never to come down again. Honestly, I struggled at times to finish this. It wasn’t particularly badly written – except that none of the characters were actually likable and none of them seemed to deserve my attention much less my sympathy. The only one who had much of a character to be honest was the hustler and she didn’t last too long! Overall, despite the very positive write up, and the fact that the author apparent wrote ‘Rear Window’ this was a slow and painful ready which barely kept my attention. Not really recommended except, maybe, if you have trouble sleeping.