All It Takes Is Brains

All It Takes Is Brains

"Nothing beats a tale of fatalistic dread by the supreme master of suspense, Cornell Woolrich. His novels and hundreds of short stories define the essence of noir nihilism." - Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review <br /><br />Cornell Woolrich is "our greatest writer of Suspense Fiction." - Frances Nevins, Woolrich Biographer <br /><br />Classic films like Hitchcock's Rear Window and Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black and novels like Night has a Thousand Eyes and Rendezvous in Black earned Woolrich epithets like "the twentieth century's Edgar Allen Poe" and "the father of noir." <br /><br />All It Takes is Brains was originally published in Argosy Magazine in January, 1936 under its original title, The Crime on St. Catherine Street. It’s a fun, light-hearted story where young and wealthy Ted Hewitt makes a bet with two of his buddies that he can use his intelligence (brains) to survive in a strange city. He boards a train to Montreal, thus a third title the story was published under, One Night in Montreal, and proceeds to live it up while only having $0.75 cents in his pocket. Unfortunately, he meets Louie and Margot who think they can roll him for dough and Ted plays along with their ill conceived scheme which, unfortunately, leads to murder with police chasing Hewitt, convinced he is the murderer. Classic noir set-up but, as Francis Nevins comments in his biography, “Woolrich plays the situation purely for thrills and laughs, and the result is an adventurous urban romp more or less in the vein of the Indiana Jones movies."<br /><br />Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (4 December 1903 – 25 September 1968) is one of America's best crime and noir writers who sometimes wrote under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley. He's often compared to other celebrated crime writers of his day, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler. Woolrich is considered the godfather of film noir and is often referred to as the Edgar Allen Poe of the 20th century, writing well over 250 works including novels, novelettes, novellas and short stories. Film noir is a familiar genre, with deep shadows, half-lit profiles, femme fatales, fedoras and trench coats. But Woolrich’s works are more than that – they are about flawed, but sympathetic characters who are caught up in a moral dilemma that is greater than themselves. Woolrich’s touch can be found in modern day film and television adaptations, from "Fatal Attraction" to "The Wire" - because after all, this is a world where characters are caught between doing the wrong thing for the right reason. 88 feature films and television series episodes have used Woolrich as source material, including Hitchcock’s "Rear Window", Francois Truffaut’s "The Bride Wore Black" and "Mississippi Mermaid", and three different adaptations of “I Married a Dead Man”, most recently as "Mrs. Winterbourne".<br /><br />He attended New York's Columbia University but left school in 1926 without graduating when his first novel, "Cover Charge", was published. "Cover Charge" was one of six of his novels that he credits as inspired by the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Woolrich soon turned to pulp and detective fiction, often published under his pseudonyms. His best known story today is his 1942 "It Had to Be Murder" for the simple reason that it was adapted into the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie "Rear Window"starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly. It was remade as a television film by Christopher Reeve in 1998.