Very Good minus/Very Good - Spine is tightly bound, staples clean and tight, no loose pages. Moderate creasing and wear. Strong colors, some foxing. The pages are tan and supple. A very collectible copy that can still be read.
After-Dinner Story is a 1944 short story collection by American crime writer Cornell Woolrich under the pseudonym William Irish. It comprises six stories, and includes two of Woolrich's best known works, novella Marihuana and Rear Window (originally published in Dime Detective Magazine under the title "It Had to be Murder"),[1] which was made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock in 1954.[2]
Story Summaries
After-Dinner Story - Six men were trapped in an elevator after a terrifying accident. But that can't explain how, by the time they are rescued, one of them has been shot to death. The death is labelled as a suicide until, a year later, the murdered man's father invites the survivors of the accident together to tell them "an after dinner story".
Story Summaries
After-Dinner Story - Six men were trapped in an elevator after a terrifying accident. But that can't explain how, by the time they are rescued, one of them has been shot to death. The death is labelled as a suicide until, a year later, the murdered man's father invites the survivors of the accident together to tell them "an after dinner story".
The Night Reveals - An insurance agent suspects his wife of being a dangerous pyromaniac behind a recent spree of deadly housefires. But how can he be sure, and how can he stop her?
An Apple a Day - This story centers around a criminal who after desperately stealing ten thousand dollars unwittingly throws away five times that sum with the toss of an apple.
Marihuana - Depressed after breaking up with his wife Eleanor, Vinnie is pressured into trying marijuana for the first time by his friends. Under the influence, he turns into a psychotic spree killer and starts a night of rampage on the city.
Rear Window - After breaking his leg, Hal Jeffries has nothing better to do than sit at the window and observe his neighbours in the apartment building across the way. Soon he starts to realise something isn't quite right in one of the apartments - can he really be witnessing the aftermath of a murder?
Murder-Story - A writer becomes a prime suspect in a murder case, especially after the police discover one of his unpublished stories almost exactly recounts what must have happened the night of the crime.
Cornell Woolrich is widely regarded as the twentieth century’s finest writer of pure suspense fiction. The author of numerous classic novels and short stories (many of which were turned into classic films) such as Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Waltz Into Darkness, and I Married a Dead Man, Woolrich began his career in the 1920s writing mainstream novels that won him comparisons to F. Scott Fitzgerald. The bulk of his best-known work, however, was written in the field of crime fiction, often appearing serialized in pulp magazines or as paperback novels. Because he was prolific, he found it necessary to publish under multiple pseudonyms, including "William Irish" and "George Hopley" Woolrich lived a life as dark and emotionally tortured as any of his unfortunate characters and died, alone, in a seedy Manhattan hotel room following the amputation of a gangrenous leg. Upon his death, he left a bequest of one million dollars to Columbia University, to fund a scholarship for young writers
