Boy meets girl. Boy and girl get engaged. Girl’s relatives die in the Lusitania disaster. Girl leaves town for funeral. Boy cheats on girl while she’s gone. Hussy blackmails boy to keep their secret from girl. Boy pays. Boy pays again. But hussy won’t leave boy alone, even on his wedding day. Boy kills hussy.

What bachelor on the verge of matrimony hasn’t had this experience? Certainly not Prescott Marshall, the protagonist and antagonist of FRIGHT, a Hard Case Crime reprint of REAR WINDOW author Cornell Woolrich’s 1950 pseudonymous novel. And that’s just the first 50 pages.

Not one to let a little act of homicide ruin his big day, Prescott gets married mere minutes afterward and jets off for his honeymoon, but becomes increasingly paranoid with each passing minute that every stranger he meets is some cop waiting to arrest him. So great it grows that rather return home to New York, he takes a job as far away as he can get.

But old habits die hard. And the dead have a tricky way of coming back to haunt you.

FRIGHT is an interesting animal, because as poetic as Woolrich’s prose can be – and is, especially early on – Prescott is such an irredeemable cad. From the second page, we essentially have no choice but to dislike him outright, upon learning that he only proposed marriage because his fiancée’s family is swimming in money. Yet we read and we read through skillfully crafted pages in hopes of seeing him get what’s due, and I don’t mean money.

This being a novel from the early 1950s, it’s kinda funny how chasté FRIGHT is forced to be; the book never once comes out and says Prescott had sex with the girl blackmailing him. It’s all implied.

As another sign of its times, however, Prescott eventually gets his comeuppance, and in a manner that I dare say is pretty clever. I was all set to call Woolrich out for what I found to be a rather gaping plothole, only to see it sewn up in an epilogue that I had to read twice just to make sure I didn’t dream it. Pretty sneaky, Corny. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.