“The Cornell Woolrich mood”

Last week I tweeted that I’d been in a Cornell Woolrich “mood” one night as I went out around Times Square looking for a good, but inexpensive, hamburger. What I was referring to was two-fold:

In his collection Bluebeard’s Seventh Wife, published under his “William Irish” pseudonym, he has a haunting story called “The Hat” wherein a guy named Marty Dillon goes into a “one-armed joint” for dinner. Woolrich explains what the term means in the following excerpt:

The definition of “one-armed joint” is in the second paragraph.

So it was a cheap place to get a meal back in the 1930s. I was feeling frustrated in 2025 knowing that if I wanted to get a simple hamburger, fries and a soda at a decent enough place, I’d probably have to shell out about $25 these days. Just a lot more than I wanted to spend.

I did find a good place for an inexpensive non-fast food burger on Ninth Avenue, sans the fries but that was okay. I got the sandwich for under ten bucks and ate it while I walked. I like to do that sometimes; I do it in the mornings with egg sandwiches.

 

It’s a small independent restaurant, with a counter, called Lovely’s Old Fashioned on Ninth Avenue and 45th Street.

But the other aspect of the “Woolrich mood” was the gloom I felt. Just kind of down, which was why “The Hat” came to mind. The most memorable part of the story is that poor Marty Dillon, a Woolrich-style noir victim if there ever was one, has his dinner in the one-armed joint and then accidentally takes the wrong hat off the hook when he leaves. It looks like his hat but it isn’t, and it leads to the real owner of the hat–a criminal–tracking Marty down. The reason is that the hat contains counterfeit money in the hat band which the thug is distributing around town. Marty discovers this and it leads to his bad end.

Woolrich’s story reflected my pessimistic mood, basically, not that I was in Marty Dillon’s situation (thank the gods). 

After I had my hamburger I came home and read “The Hat” again. The rest of the story, which is pretty good but not as memorable as the opening, is about how a smart detective tracks down Marty’s killer through the evidence of Marty’s hat, which the thug returned with a residue of hair oil. It turns into a vital clue since Marty didn’t use that stuff on his head.

 

“The Hat” is one of six stories in this memorable 1952 paperback anthology.

Well, you live in New York CIty long enough, you can get into these depressive  “Woolrich” noir moods from time to time…

But the town is a place of many moods, obviously. Based on what a friend of mine tweeted (complete with a stunning photo), around the same time as I was walking down the street feeling fatalistic and eating my burger she was enjoying a glorious vista of the burg while enjoying a cocktail in a rooftop bar. And that’s New York: the high and the low thrumming along simultaneously day and night.