Cornell Woolrich and the Tough-Man Tradition of American Crime Fiction

In recent years, and with increasing frequency, Cornell Woolrich has been categorized as a member of the hard-boiled school of American crime fiction and one of its most important early practitioners. Objections to this categorization notwithstanding, Woolrich's stories provide critical counterpoints to the work of his better-known contemporaries and to some of the taken-for-granted conventions of early hard-boiled crime fiction. This article originally appeared in Clues: A Journal of Detection, Volume 28, Issue 2.