Cornell Woolrich is "our greatest writer of Suspense Fiction" - Francis Nevins, Woolrich biographer. "Death Sits in the Dentist's Chair" was Cornell Woolrich's first short mystery and was published in "Detective Fiction Weekly" in 1934. By publishing this story, the magazine and it's editor can probably be credited for launching one of America's greatest writers, if not greatest writer, of "suspense fiction" having bought and published Woolrich's first two short mystery stories. For obvious reasons, a must-read for any Woolrich fan! A newspaper reporter visits his dentist friend to have a cavity filled but has to wait until the dentist finishes with a previous patient, a poor and illiterate Italian immigrant who then dies in the dental chair. Rogers, convinced it was murder, undergoes the same surgery to prove his theory, which turns into a frantic race against time - a recurring device in Woolrich stories. 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. 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.
Author
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. Source: [http://www.hardcasecrime.com/books\_bi...]
