When it comes to American crime fiction from the 1930s and 1940s the grand masters are Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M Cain. But there is a second tier of less well known crime novelists from that era: David Goodis, Dorothy Hughes and Cornell Woolrich to name a few who I am glad to say are now getting the recognition they deserve.

I have yet to read Goodis but I have read Hughes and Woolrich. Both are excellent writers and I’ve become particularly drawn to Cornell Woolrich. Deadline at Dawn (1944) is the second Woolrich novel I’ve read and if you have not read him before, it’s a good place to start.

Deadline at Dawn is set in 1941, Manhattan, and when the novel begins we meet Bricky Coleman, a young woman who works at a dancehall. Men come in and they pay for a dance. The girls at the club are on their feet dancing from 6:00 pm to 1:00 am six nights a week. Becky hates her job, hates the city and would like to go back home to Glen Falls, IA. But her friends and family believe, due to the letters she sends them, that her Broadway acting career is taking off and she doesn’t want to let them down.

The dancehall closes for the night and Bricky is walking home when she is accosted by a man who means no good. But before anything bad can happen a young man named Quinn Williams comes to her rescue and walks Bricky the rest of the way home. She recognizes Quinn as the young man at the club who paid for a number of dances with her. Understandably, she is wary.

But Bricky begins to warm to Quinn when he tells her he too is from Glen Falls. She is suspicious at first but it turns out they grew up not far from each other and know many of the same people. Quinn trusts Bricky as well which is why he reveals to her what has been troubling him.

While working on a job at a townhouse in the East 70s Quinn came in contact with a key to the front door and took it. He meant to return the key but forgot about it and then when the company he worked for closed up, Quinn was desparate. And so earlier that night when the owner of the townhouse, Steven Graves, was at a party with his fiance, Quinn took $2,400. But as he tells Becky the guilt is now consuming him:

“Until now, I’d owned the streets. That was about all I’d had, but I’d had them, at least. I was hungry and broke and jobless, but I looked everyone square in the face, I went anywhere I damn pleased on them, the streets were mine. Now all of a sudden, the streets were taken away from me, to stay on them too long became dangerous. Faces coming toward me, if they seemed to look at me too closely, became something to watch out for. And people walking behind me—my shoulder would twitch, as if I expected a hand to drop on it” – Cornell Woolrich

Bricky hatches a plan. They’ll go back to the townhouse let themselves in with the key and put the money back and then they’ll catch the 6:00 am bus to Glen Falls where they can have a new start. Quinn is afraid of dragging Bricky further into this mess but Bricky is determined. She insists on going with Quinn while he returns the money and then at 6:00 am they can be on tne bus to Iowa. Only one problem, when they go back to the town house they discover that Steven Graves has been murdered.

This puts a damper on their 6:00 am plans and Quinn tells Bricky to forget about him, just get on the bus yourself to safety. But Bricky wont hear of it and so at around 2:30 am they decide based on clues found in the townhouse to split up and search for the killer and whoever finds him alert the police and they’ll both meet back at 6:00 am at the bus station. Will they find the killer? Will they be killed? Will they both be at the bus stop at 6:00 am? I’ll leave it there.

Cornell Woolrich wrote his greatest novels in the 1940s, but the Depression era of the 1930s is in many ways his muse. Quinn and Bricky are young and desparate. And desparate people seem to be the central characters in many of Woolrich’s novels, only to discover that by trying to fix their predicament by crossing a line they’ve made things worse.

I really liked Deadline at Dawn. Quinn and Bricky are good people and whatever strength Quinn may lack, Bricky is there to bolster him up. She has her dream, to have them both on the bus to Iowa by 6:00 am.