It’s the birthday of suspense writer Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968), who was considered merely one of the better—not the best—noir novelists of the 1940s and 50s, but a bazillion of whose stories were adapted for the screen, including the story on which Rear Window is based (1954, Alfred Hitchcock).

Woolrich was born in New York City to unhappily married parents who separated early. He spent some years living with his father, a civil engineer, in Mexico during the days of Pancho Villa’s revolution. Woolrich loved the excitement of occasional school closings and gunshots, and he collected spent cartridges that he found outside their house; he later said, “I wouldn’t have cared if the revolution had never ended.” He went on to study at Columbia University in New York but didn’t finish; instead, while laid up with an illness, he wrote Cover Charge, a Jazz Age novel, which was published in 1926. It was successful enough that he dropped out of school. His next novel, Children of the Ritz (1927), won a $10,000 prize and was adapted for film.

While in Hollywood working on the script for Children of the Ritz, Woolrich married the daughter of a producer, but the marriage didn’t work out because Woolrich didn’t actually like girls except for his mother. The marriage was eventually annulled and Woolrich moved back to New York and in fact moved in with his mother, living with her until she died in 1957, at which point, I am relieved to report, he stopped living with her and lived alone until his own death, at which point he was buried with her in her vault. So there’s that.

Before Woolrich’s mother died and before he died, they lived in a seedy motel, the Hotel Marseilles, even though he made plenty of money and could have lived elsewhere. He wrote novels in the corner of the hotel room while his mother watched, and he wrote under several names, including William Irish and George Hopley. He started writing thrillers in the 40s, including his “Black” novels, starting with The Bride Wore Black (1940), which described a bride’s race against time to avenge the death of her bridegroom. In 1942 he wrote the story “It Had to Be Murder” on which Rear Window was based. New Yorker critic David Denby, reflecting on the movie many years later, wrote, “Everything that [Jimmy] Stewart sees across the courtyard—loneliness, marital entrapment, murder—reflects his own fantasies or terrors. The voyeur ends up spying on his own life, and it comes back at him and almost destroys him” (New Yorker, March 19, 2007).

Woolrich won an Edgar Allen Poe Award in 1950 for another movie, The Window. Woolrich’s health was ultimately destroyed by diabetes and alcoholism and he spent most of his final decade alone. He died at 64 and left a million dollars to Columbia, where the endowment continues to benefit students of writing.

Have a super bright and cheery Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.