That settles it -- I'm a Cornell Woolrich fan

CARROLL JOHN DALY let me down.
I read his novella "The Third Murderer" in "THE BLACK LIZARD BIG BOOK OF PULPS," a fantastic collection of magazine crime fiction of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.
Daly used a lengthy letter from a character to tie up loose ends in his story. It smacked of a device used by an author who has found himself in a creative cul-de-sac.
Thank goodness, then, for CORNELL WOOLRICH.
I am now reading "THE DILEMMA OF THE DEAD LADY" in the same pulp fiction book. It is thrilling and fantastic: A tale of a killer on a cross-Atlantic sailing whose victim inhabits a trunk in his stateroom.
"Of all the authors whose forte was turning our spines to columns of ice, the supreme master of the art, the Hitchcock of the written word, was Cornell Woolrich," Francis M. Nevins wrote in his introduction to "Night & Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich."
Nevins is right. Woolrich had the ability to ratchet up a reader's anxiety from one paragraph to another.
"Woolrich is at his best," Nevins writes, "when he sets a protagonist in a hopeless situation and forces us to share that person's ordeal."
"The Dilemma of the Dead Lady" proves that assessment emphatically.
Not all pulp magazine authors simply churned out unimaginative copy. There was Woolrich, after all.