Safe Return Doubtful

American Pulp Fiction – Published 1940

I’m a big admirer of the writing of Cornell Woolrich, he of 22 novels and more than 200 stories. Though his plots may require readers to suspend disbelief, the reader sticks at it.. however unlikely the scenario may be, it is not impossible, just very unlikely. As much as finding out how the plot unfurls, we want to see just how Woolrich pulls it off.

He provokes the reader’s curiosity in ways none of his noir counterparts, even Chandler or Hammett, ever considered attempting. Chandler, an admirer of his ‘artificial trick plots’ commented that he made ‘excessive demands on Lady Chance’.

Such is All At Once, No Alice, set in the fictional city of Michianopolis. It first appeared in Argosy Magazine in March 1940, and the plot centres around the mysterious disappearance of a beautiful young woman, a scenario that Woolrich uses quite often.

The narrator is Jimmy Cannon, a store clerk, who elopes with Alice Brown, a girl who he has barely just met, but has fallen in love with. They marry and go in search for a hotel, but due to a convention being on, very little is available, and they only manage to find a single bed in a loft room for Alice, and a bed at the Y for Jimmy. In the morning, you guessed it, any trace of Alice has disappeared.

Though it begins in a lighthearted manner, it soon turns dark as Jimmy searches for Alice. Even the roadside justice of the peace, who married them, denies even meeting them. The tension increases as the darker mood does, Jimmy’s narration conveying his feeling of utter desperation and alienation. What began as a jaunty tale is now more reminiscent of something written by Poe.

And all this in just over 50 pages, longer than a usual ‘short story’, a format that Woolrich favoured, as not only did it suit the magazine format but also could be adapted for things like ‘The Twilight Zone’ or ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’.

Interestingly also, it’s an example of a sub-genre he pioneered, paranoid noir; the story awash with overtones of guilt, fear and despair – though a variation of which, perhaps the forerunner, is the 1936 novel by Ethel Lina White, The Lady Vanishes, later to be a Hitchcock film), three years earlier.