Cigarette (1936)

by Cornell Woolrich

One of the things I’ve always liked about Cornell Woolrich’s crime stories is that they are almost never about private detectives and policemen. There were still plenty of murders and graft, but because he stayed away from detectives it forced him to come up with all sorts of interesting protagonists. The other thing he liked to do in his early stories was come up with interesting ways of murdering someone, usually through some sort of gadget or device that could be given to someone else, unknowingly, and thus remove the murderer from suspicion by providing a rock-solid alibi. “Cigarette” was published in the January 11, 1936 edition of Detective Fiction Weekly, and features a naïve errand boy named Eddie Dean who found himself in prison with a mob boss. The Boss takes a liking to him and gives him a job running errands for him that are not necessarily illegal in and of themselves, but are typically part of a larger overall scheme that Eddie knows nothing about. This time the Boss gives him a cigarette case, even though Eddie doesn’t smoke, with explicit instructions to make sure a Mr. Miller--a guy Eddie’s already been ordered to get close to--gets the first one in the case.

Eddie follows orders like a good boy and heads for the bar where Miller hangs out. Woolrich has been called the Hitchcock of the written word, and for good reason--not to mention the fact that Rear Window, arguably Hitchcock’s best film, was adapted from a Woolrich story--because he builds suspense in a way that few other crime writers ever managed. On his way to the bar Eddie sees a man who just missed getting into the drugstore for cigarettes before it closed and begs Eddie for one, which Eddie gladly gives him. The man puts the poison cigarette in his pocket and heads back to his apartment while Eddie continues on his way to carry out his mission. Once he is done he calls the boss but his henchman Tommy, who thought he’d be dead by now, goes crazy and threatens to throw Eddie in jail for murder if someone else dies from the cigarette. So the race is on to get the cigarette from the guy he gave it too. He runs as fast as he can back to the guy’s apartment, only to find out he’s still alive but gave the poison cigarette to a friend of his who lives in the suburbs. Then it’s into a cab and a race to find the friend before he inhales the deadly smoke. Eventually suspense turns to comedy as he discovers the friend’s wife threw it out of the window of the car, and the great twist ending completes the effect.

Though pulp stories aren’t particularly known for the quality of the writing per se, there are some interesting descriptions that jump out as the story begins. The most vivid one is of Tommy, the right hand man of the Boss. “Tommy the Twitch, who was always with the Boss, shoved forward a chair, like an executioner, for Eddie. A bullet had done something to his spinal cord and he never stopped shaking.” And that’s all we get, but it’s enough. Eddie gets about the same. “The thin, inoffensive-looking young fellow they both called The Errand Boy dropped the newspaper he had been pretending to read and got up without having to be told twice. He looked a little scared. He always was when the Boss sent for him like this.” But even those two descriptions are more than the Boss gets, which is nothing except for the fact that he likes to smoke imported cigars. Instead, the emphasis is on plot. In this case characterization takes a backseat and the characters are no more than types, to be put through their paces by Woolrich. Eddie’s frantic attempt to recover the cigarette is the action that propels the story forward, and Woolrich ratchets up the tension when Eddie is told over the phone what is in the cigarette.

          Only the narrowness of the booth kept Eddie from falling to his knees with fright. Terror of Tommy
          and the Boss was still uppermost in his mind though, ahead of another terror . . . He didn’t want to
          kill anyone; he didn’t want to become a murderer. He wouldn’t even have given it to Miller if he’d
          known ahead of time . . . “For God’s sake let me look for it first and then tell him if you hafta!” His
          voice trailed off into a groan and he replaced the receiver with an arm that was shaking more than
          Tommy ever had in his life.

Fortunately Woolrich isn’t relentless with this kind of description, and toward the end of the story he injects some realism into Eddie’s frantic search. “The long chase had blunted some of the edge off his terror, but he was still worried and plenty scared. He was no longer at the pitch of frenzy in which he’d torn from the hotel to the Adams flat. But he had to get that cigarette back to the Boss.” If there’s a criticism to be made it’s the racism inherent in Woolrich’s writing that seems to be absent from many of the other big names at the time. In one scene toward the end when a black man has inadvertently picked up the cigarette he’s described in an abundance of derogatory ways, beginning with “the big vagrant,” someone Eddie felt, “he could dominate mentally, if not physically.” Later, as Eddie offers him a dollar bill for the cigarette, “the round, white eyeballs protruded toward it, as though it were a magnet drawing them half out of the roustabout’s skull,” and of course the stereotype becomes complete when he grabs the money and runs. Yes, it’s part and parcel of the times, but no less disturbing for it and something that is all the more disappointing for how unnecessary it is to the story.

Through it all, though, the good and the bad, one thing the reader notices instantly about Woolrich’s fiction is its vibrancy. Unlike the downbeat mood of the detective fiction of the period, Woolrich’s stories come alive and he creates a palpable feeling of suspense that is unlike the other great hard-boiled writers that were his contemporaries. The story is contained in a brilliant anthology of the author’s uncollected works called Night & Fear. Unfortunately sales were so dismal that it was never even issued in a paperback edition. Nevertheless, Cornell Woolrich stands among the best of his day with a style of writing and an emphasis on story that is all his own. “Cigarette,” while an early example of that style, still manages to be vintage Woolrich.