The Black Curtain
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In a nightmare scenario, Frank Townsend has an apparently minor accident on his way home but he arrives to find his wife gone and doesn't recognise his apartment. He had gone to work on a normal day but didn't return for more than three years. Suffering from amnesia, he has to rediscover who he is, where he has been and what he has done. A curtain has fallen to cut off all memories of his life.
First among the memories he wants to recover is whether he has committed the murder of which he has been accused. A mysterious stranger with a gun has been following him while he attempts to simultaneously understand what has happened in his past while doing all he can to extricate himself from a seemingly hopeless situation and regain his reputation. He does not yet know that he is in great jeopardy and there is no one he can trust to rescue him from the abyss.
The Black Curtain is the second of Cornell Woolrich's celebrated "black" books, following The Bride Wore Black, which established his reputation as America's greatest noir writer. It was adapted into film as the classic Street of Chance, starring Burgess Meredith and Claire Trevor.
Cornell Woolrich
Cornell Woolrich (1903-68) was born in New York but spent much of his childhood being shunted between his father, a civil engineer in Latin America, and his mother who was socially prominent in New York. In the early 1929s he went to Columbia College but left before graduating to write. He published six novels before his first crime story appeared in 1934. His first mystery novel, The Bride Wore Black, appeared in 1940 and very quickly established itself as a classic of the genre. When he died he left an estate of close to a million dollars to Columbia University for scholarships in creative writing.
More by Cornell Woolrich
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