Night Has a Thousand Eyes: Pretty horrifying, after all

Night Has a Thousand Eyes by Cornell Woolrich

On the cover of my Dell paperback edition of Night Has a Thousand Eyes (with a cover price of 25 cents), the author is listed as William Irish, with an asterisk next to the name. At the bottom of the cover, next to the footnote asterisk, is another name: George Hopley. This should not fool any prospective readers, though. Both names were pseudonyms of Cornell Woolrich, the author whom Isaac Asimov called “THE Master of Suspense”; whom his biographer, Francis Nevins, Jr., called “the Edgar Allan Poe of the 20th century” (hey, wait a minute … I thought that H.P. Lovecraft was considered the Edgar Allan Poe of the 20th century!); and who is considered one of the fathers of literary film noir. Many of Woolrich’s novels and stories have been famously filmed, “Rear Window,” “The Bride Wore Black,” “Phantom Lady,” “Deadline at Dawn” and “Mississippi Mermaid” being just a sampling. Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945) was turned into a 1948 Edward G. Robinson movie that supposedly has little in common with the book. That’s a shame, as the book is a marvelous piece of eerie suspense writing that could have made a smashing film.

In Woolrich’s tale, Detective Tom Shawn saves Jean Reid from a suicide attempt one night, and later hears her tale. She is in despair because the death of her wealthy father has been predicted by a man seemingly gifted with the power of clairvoyance; a man whose predictions have unerringly aided her father in his business many times before. Shawn and a squad of detectives investigate this death prediction, and try to avert the millionaire businessman from meeting his ordained end at the stroke of midnight “at the jaws of a lion.” The reader will never guess how things turn out, or how Harlan Reid eventually winds up.

Woolrich writes with a superabundance of detail, which slows things down a little but also ratchets up the suspense factor. We get more and more nervous as that midnight hour approaches, while Woolrich teases us by describing how the milk looks in one of the character’s coffee, and by giving us the minutiae of a bridge game. Hitchcock himself could not have drawn more suspense out of the book’s brilliantly sustained final third. It is a bravura example of a writer anticipating what his reader wants, and holding it tantalizingly out of reach…

I came to this book after having read of it in Newman & Jones’ overview volume entitled Horror: 100 Best Books. As Night Has a Thousand Eyes progressed, I found myself thinking that the book isn’t all that scary; extremely suspenseful, yes, and in parts a bit eerie, but certainly not a horror book. But upon finishing the novel, the reader will inevitably realize that the characters in Night Has a Thousand Eyes have no free will at all. Everything is preordained, and human beings are trapped in this master plan. The thousand star-eyes of the title look down on us, mercilessly and aloof. No wonder poor Jean Reid can’t bear to look at them. Woolrich’s vision of a relentless, bleak and deterministic universe turns out to be a pretty horrifying thing after all!