Suicidal Heroines

Crushed by steel wheels.

Anna Karenina has been made into a film. Again. I’m not certain how many times this new production makes, but in my opinion, it’s too many times. There is a finite

Drug overdose.

amount of women committing suicide as a legitimate solution to their problems, I can take. Romanticizing the taking of one’s existence is ingrained into society’s fabric. If the people doing it are beautiful and in many cases helpless women. Greta Garbo standing on the edge of the railroad platform ready to dive, may seem like a

dramatic and tragic ending, but in fact, if viewers were to see her remains after said train’s vicious steel wheels crushed her beautiful face to pulp, and her gorgeous costumes were clotted with skin, bone, and brain matter, how romantic would her death then seem? Sure, she had abandoned her child and husband for a lover who then tosses her aside. And the punishment for those sins in that period of history? Social disgrace, maybe even being thrown on the streets with nothing. But why must the cost of a woman’s independence in the books of that era, always seem to be death?

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The Night Has a Thousand Eyes. Best 100 Mysteries of All time

 

Pulp paperback version who lists Hopley as author, and then claims another Woolrich pen name as the real author.

The Night Has a Thousand EyesGeorge Hopley–(Cornell Woolrich)–1948–IP

Of  the numerous novels of suspense Woolrich has written and I’ve read, The Night Has a Thousand Eyescaused the most tense and angst filled moments. The uneasy

The younger Cornell Woolrich.

reality of a Woolrich novel is the knowledge that the conclusion of the story can go either way. A relentless dark hopeless story can end miraculously, or tragically. The reader is unaware of which will prevail until nearly the last words. The journey to the conclusion can be nerve shattering in intensity. In the instance of this novel, it haunted me, and now that I’m rethinking, it still does. It’s a novel of predestination, of a lack of control over life and death, of hope that ekes along, but barely.

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