GEORGE HOPLEY – Night Has a Thousand Eyes. Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1945. Reprinted as by William Irish: Dell #679, 1953. Reprinted as by Cornell Woolrich: Paperback Library 54-438, 1967. Many other reprint editions, both hardcover and soft.

   Night Has a Thousand Eyes was the first of two novels published under a pseudonym made up of Cornell Woolrich’s middle names, and of all his books it’s the one most completely dominated by death and fate. A simpleminded recluse with apparently uncanny powers predicts that millionaire Harlan Reid will die in three weeks, precisely at midnight, at the jaws of a lion.

   The tension rises to an unbearable pitch as the apparently doomed man, his daughter, and a sympathetic young homicide detective struggle to avert a destiny that they at first suspect and soon come to hope was conceived by a merely human power.

   Woolrich makes us live the emotional torment and suspense of the situation until we are literally shivering in our seats.

   The roots of Woolrich’ s longest and perhaps finest novel lie deep in his past. From the moment at the age of eleven when he knew that someday he would have to die, he “had that trapped feeling,” he wrote in his unpublished autobiography, “like some sort of a poor insect that you’ve put inside a down-turned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can’t, and it can’t, and it can’t.”

   Of all the recurring nightmare situations in his noir repertory, the most terrifying is that of the person doomed to die at a precise moment, and knowing what that moment is, and flailing out desperately against his or her fate.

   This is what connects the protagonists of Woolrich’ s strongest work, including Paul Stapp in “Three O’Clock,” Robert Lamont in “Guillotine,” Scott Henderson in Phantom Lady, and of course Reid in Night Has a Thousand Eyes. Only a writer tom apart by human mortality could have created these stories.

   Published under a new by-line and by a firm never before associated with Woolrich, Night Has a Thousand Eyes seems to have been intended as a breakthrough book, to introduce the author to a wider audience, but it was too grim and unsettling for huge commercial success.

   The 1948 movie version, starring Edward G. Robinson as a carnival mind reader with the power to foresee disasters, had almost nothing in common with the story line of Woolrich’ s novel, let alone its power and terror.

   This book is what noir literature is all about, a nerve-shredding suspense classic of the highest quality and a work that once read can never be forgotten.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.