I'm Dangerous Tonight

I'm Dangerous Tonight

Cornell Woolrich is "our greatest writer of Suspense Fiction" - Francis Nevins, Woolrich biographer.<br /><br />"I'm Dangerous Tonight" is one of Woolrich's short stories classified as a novella based upon it's length. It was originally published in the first edition of the new monthly pulp magazine, "All-American Fiction", in 1937. Not known for writing supernatural stories, this particular work is one of few where Woolrich crossed into that genre. <br /><br />Here, we find a dress that Satan has infused with an evil essence causing the possessor, a Paris model, an Iowa housewife and a singer involved in a narcotic subplot to the story, to become a psychotic murderess. It's called pulp fiction for a reason and Woolrich earns the title with this particular tome.<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.<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.