![]() ![]() The killer’s victims include a society gentleman, an middle class family man, and a Bohemian artist. ![]() ![]() What I liked most about The Bride Wore Black was the way it introduced us to slices of pre-World War II American life. Once that happens, the twists start coming hard and fast and we, finally, learn why our killer is bumping off all these ordinary men. She is able to kill three men over the course of almost two years before other detectives start to listen to the one member of their number who thought that the deaths were all connected murders. The next chapters reveal this woman to be a master (mistress?) of disguise, able to change even her personality, to lure in the men on her list. At first, all we know is that she has a list of names and that she’s lying about her own name. There is a mysterious woman killing men in Chicago, sometime before 1940. This book is very much in the vein of Golden Age mysteries that readers inhaled by the thousands until mystery writers started adding layers to their characters exploring the psychology of perpetrators, victims, and investigators and hewing much closer to reality. This twisty mystery is all about creating seemingly impossible murders than it is about psychological depth, fair play, or realism. Originally published in 1940, Cornell Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black is interesting (at least to me) more as a study of mid-century mysteries and how much the genre has changed in the last 80 years. ![]()
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