mystery-thriller

Good always has a price, Marcus. Evil comes free.

Everyday is another adventure!

If my life were a movie ... the title sequence would start out like a typical high school story, but then reveal that something's amiss. There'd be a tight shot, or piece of dialogue, or something that would make the viewer uncomfortable. Something to give them that prickly feeling.-Dez

He looked up at the stars as the storm closed in and saw them extinguished, one-by-one, until just two remained. They glimmered and shone through gaps in the clouds like two great eyes in the darkness, burning on a demon__ face that chased him across the sea.

Red glowing eyes... No one could see her. No one could hear her. No one was coming to save her. Because Death had come sooner than expected.

He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work, stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to BLACK MASK and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibility but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimax to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple, Chandler, had verged toward this more than a little, there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations: Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death but the novels and short stories of Woolrich *were* death. In all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality.Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract a Truffaut whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre, the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. At all. But the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.

And to think I could be at home cleaning the cat box," Esther Charlemagne said. "Watching for a Peeping Tom is so much better."~ Chapter 2 The Night Shadow by Cheri Vause

I've deprived my family in order to buy books. No doubt there is a special punishment in hell for such self-indulgence. Perhaps I shall be struck with blindness among the rarest known to men.

Calvi was sobbing. This couldn't be! A moment ago the Pope was healthy, smiling. How could His Holiness be no longer? Only a month into his papacy!

Whatever was in that document had caused the death of the leader of the Catholic Church. Who'd be next? Calvi shuddered. His life's work was safe-guarding this document. Whatever its purpose or mystery, it was his solemn and sole mission to protect it. Even if it meant giving up his life for it.

Lord, I'll embrace whatever it is you want me to do, but please, please let me know what it is." - Father Kevin Thrall.

What__ the mission at hand? To save the Church? To save the pope? Uncover a menacing secret society within the Church? Eliminate the would-be assassins? Or could it be something else, something even more portentous and earth-shattering?

Did you mean what you said before? About the dead hanging around? You really believe it?

I look away, but we've caught each other. And I know this wasn't just a ghost story to him, even if it was to the others.

The blank sheet stares up at me, its emptiness like a slap. Those were the last words Ginny ever wrote before she and her family were murdered.

Sometimes the closer you are to the truth, the harder it is to see.

What to do? Fight it or play along? Was God behind it?

Books are keys that open many doors.