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Waltz into Darkness by Cornell Woolrich
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Waltz into Darkness (original 1947; edition 1995)

by Cornell Woolrich (Author)

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2608101,727 (3.47)18
Having never met his fiancee, Louis Durant should have been a little more suspicious when a beautiful young blonde showed up instead of the elder brunette that he was expecting. Like many men, he couldn’t see beyond her looks until it was too late. Waltz Into Darkness by Cornell Woolrich is a story of greed, deception and loss of innocence and self-control.

Set in the 1880’s and published in 1947 this dark tale doesn’t feel dated and this plot-line would be relevant today. Woolrich is a master at dark suspense and the contrast between the susceptible Durant and the clever smoothness of Julia draws the reader into the story. When tragedy befalls, we are ready, but unfortunately Durant is not.

I am a huge Woolrich fan and this is a good one. I was a little disappointed in how the author softened the ending as I would rather have had Julia’s actions and motives remain ambiguous. Although this book is set in the 18th century it still had a very noir feeling as it deals with a man’s downward spiral at the hands of a femme fatale. I found Waltz Into Darkness a real page turner. ( )
  DeltaQueen50 | May 12, 2019 |
English (7)  French (1)  All languages (8)
Showing 7 of 7
Different from the other Woolrich stories I've read as this is set in 1880 and concerns Louis Durand, a lonely man in his thirties who is the wealthy co-owner of a coffee business in New Orleans. His fiancée died on the eve of their wedding years ago, and he has not found love again, but he is now awaiting the arrival of the woman he is going to marry, who he has never met but has corresponded with. But when the river steamer from St Louis arrives, she is not aboard - or is she? A stunningly beautiful blonde woman in her early twenties introduces herself as his bride to be, explaining the discrepancy with the photo she sent, of a dark haired mature woman, by saying that she sent a photo of her aunt, as she prefers older men and wanted to be judged on her character in her letters, not her appearance.

Durand can hardly believe his luck and falls head over heels, failing to pick up on the wrong notes that are obvious to the reader. Before long, betrayal ensues and he believes he now hates her, but his own romantic weakness will ultimately destroy him.

This is the story of a love that can see no reason, literally. Love is blind despite Durand's eventual realisation of his wife's faults and her complicity and perhaps worse in the murder of his prospective bride. The ending doesn't really convince, with the idea that someone who can be so horribly callous can have a sudden total change of heart, and Durand's wilful ignorance also is rather wearing.
( )
  kitsune_reader | Nov 23, 2023 |
Delicious fun. Irish (aka Cornell Woolrich) tries his hand at a big melodrama set in the late nineteenth century American South, a change from his more usual seedy noir New York. A tale of obsessive, misguided passion, criminality, amorality, and violence in a long-distance epistolary romance gone terribly wrong. Probably over-long, padded with quite a few too many gas lamps and sweepingly opulent petticoats, but still wryly observant, with a fundamentally cynical view of women's deviousness and men's foolishness and lust, and with some very good crisp writing. The abruptly redemptive ending doesn't work very well, but it kept me up past my bedtime to see how it got there. Definitely the sort of thing you'll like, if you like this sort of thing.

See more reviews on my website - https://juliestielstra.com ( )
  JulieStielstra | Jul 11, 2021 |
Having never met his fiancee, Louis Durant should have been a little more suspicious when a beautiful young blonde showed up instead of the elder brunette that he was expecting. Like many men, he couldn’t see beyond her looks until it was too late. Waltz Into Darkness by Cornell Woolrich is a story of greed, deception and loss of innocence and self-control.

Set in the 1880’s and published in 1947 this dark tale doesn’t feel dated and this plot-line would be relevant today. Woolrich is a master at dark suspense and the contrast between the susceptible Durant and the clever smoothness of Julia draws the reader into the story. When tragedy befalls, we are ready, but unfortunately Durant is not.

I am a huge Woolrich fan and this is a good one. I was a little disappointed in how the author softened the ending as I would rather have had Julia’s actions and motives remain ambiguous. Although this book is set in the 18th century it still had a very noir feeling as it deals with a man’s downward spiral at the hands of a femme fatale. I found Waltz Into Darkness a real page turner. ( )
  DeltaQueen50 | May 12, 2019 |
Loved it. Until the ending which is keeping with the genre but I wonder if it's the ending Woolrich would have chosen to publish. ( )
  madamepince | Dec 18, 2010 |
Cornell Woolrich was a favorite of moviemakers: his novels and stories were adapted into more than 25 motion pictures, with Rear Window as probably the most famous. Two (Francois Truffaut’s 1969 film Mississippi Mermaid and 2001’s Original Sin—which, though it is already largely forgotten in whole, has achieved an extended internet lifespan in the form of a much-viewed clip of an explicit sex scene) were based on Waltz into Darkness, a 1947 novel published by Woolrich under the pseudonym William Irish. Both of these adaptations postdate Hollywood’s noir explosion of the 40s and early 50s, and the story takes place not in hardboiled Chicago or Kansas City but in post-Civil War New Orleans. Still, this is a classic noir study of a femme fatale—in this case a woman who goes by the names Julia and Bonnie. The two women who have played Julia/Bonny, Catharine Denueve and Angelina Jolie, are beautiful actresses who can possess a serpentine coolness on screen that is, despite the deficiencies of both films, appropriate for the role.

Louis Durand is a businessman hoping to augment his financial happiness with a marriage to a mail order bride. When he arrives at a steamboat dock to meet her for the first time he finds not the plain looking woman whose photograph he was sent but a beautiful young girl. The girl, Julia, gives an unconvincing explanation as to why she deceived him about her looks, and Louis, pleased by her beauty, lets none of her ensuing suspicious behavior—a coarse crossing of the legs, the neck snapping of a song bird—convince him that she is not really the woman she claims to be, until, that is “Julia” cleans out his bank accounts and disappears. This expected betrayal, coming less than a third of the way through the book, turns Louis murderous: he stalks women who resemble Julia on the streets, hires a private detective, chases a mask wearing girl through Mardi Gras to press a revolver into her chest. These hallucinatory chapters are a fine writing performance by Mr. Woolrich, whose style throughout the book is more fluid and graceful that those of his tough guy peers.

After a chance dinner invitation brings Louis back in contact with Julia, who explains that her real name is Bonny, and he is placated by her flimsy sob story, we know that loss of money was not what drove Louis to near insanity but the loss of love. And to protect this woman he will not only cheat and murder but allow himself to be murdered.

As is typical in noir the femme fatale’s motives are ambiguous. We see her through Louis’s eyes, and are only privy to the careful chosen thoughts she shares with him. She exists as much as hints and clues left behind—as when the name “Billy” is seen on a burnt letter in a fireplace—as she does as a full bodied presence. Julia/Bonny, however, has more depth than other characters of her type—since she is revealed early on as a thief and liar, the reader doesn’t have to spend a lot of time wondering when she will show her evil, but rather is given a few hundred pages to watch her vacillate between the world she is comfortable in, that of con games and crime, and that which she aspires to, the high class life of New York fashions and fine dining. That her behavior in both of these worlds is that of a sociopath is hardly surprising, given the way that female strivers were commonly portrayed. (And perhaps still are: one of the more frequently voiced views of Hillary Clinton was the ominous one that she would “do anything to win.”) I’ll leave to the reader to judge whether the ending reveals that Julia/Bonny is a more complex being than we imagined or a hopelessly cardboard figure having an unconvincing epiphany. That Louis becomes a vehicle for her redemption, short-lived though it may be, just as she is the vehicle of his brilliantly described downfall is a nifty turnaround of a noir convention. ( )
1 vote nossis | Jul 18, 2008 |
Note: I accessed a digital review copy of this book through Edelweiss.
  fernandie | Sep 15, 2022 |
Saw the movie today...it was pretty intense.
  Litrvixen | Jun 23, 2022 |
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