Readers meet the taxi dancer first, and she is nameless at first. Her job is an anachronism: Dance halls don’t exist anymore. On one particular night at work, she meets a man, a dance partner, who gives his name as Quinn Williams. To her, he is just another face, another problem looking to make more out of a dance, but he fights off a masher outside the dance hall when she gets off work. He walks her home to help keep her safe, and she still won’t tell him her name. She does notice that he seems nervous. He keeps looking over his shoulder as though someone is following him or her—or them. She tells him that the masher won’t come back, but he insists that it’s not the masher that is on his mind.
The dancer and Quinn Williams part ways at the front entrance to her apartment building. Once she is inside her apartment, the dancer can see, from one of her windows, Quinn outside on the sidewalk, and she watches as he hides from a patrol car. After that, he disappears from view because he has chosen to hide inside the stairwell of her apartment building. She waits for him to return to the street and to leave forever, but he never does. Against her better judgment, she invites him in for a cup of coffee, nothing more.
On a table, Quinn Williams finds a letter that the dancer is still in the middle of writing. The envelope is addressed to Glen Falls, Iowa, which astounds him because that is his hometown. They quickly learn that both are from Glen Falls: He lived on Anderson Avenue; she lived on the next street over, on Emmet Road. She finally tells him her name: Bricky Coleman. Her real first name is Ruth, but people started calling her Bricky because of the color of her hair.
The chapters in the novel are not numbered. Instead, each one starts with a clockface. And here readers face another anachronism: The clockfaces are analog, not digital. Bricky first meets Quinn at 12:50 a.m. in the dance hall, and the analog clockface starts the novel at that point. The last one in the novel reads 5:45 a.m., and the novel ends just ten or fifteen minutes later. The entire novel occurs over a span of five hours and approximately five minutes.
Bricky holds a very dim view of urban living and of living in New York City in particular. She tells Quinn what she thinks of living in the city and why she has so much trouble going back home to Iowa.
“. . . I don’t know fancy language. I only know there’s an intelligence of its own hanging over this place. Coming up from it. It’s mean and bad and evil, and when you breathe too much of it for too long, it gets under your skin, it gets into you—and you’re sunk, the city’s got you . . . Then it’s too late. Then you can go anywhere—home or anywhere else—and you just keep on being what it made you from then on.” (page 43)
Bricky knows Quinn is hiding something; she knew that he was worried about something even as he walked her to the front door of her apartment building. Quinn finally admits that he is carrying a lot of money. He doesn’t say so; he just takes money—$2,500.00 minus what little he has spent so far—out of the lining of his coat. Things are tough in 1939 for Quinn Williams. He was an electrician’s assistant until the business owner had a heart attack and closed the business. But Quinn still had the front door key to the last job that they did, at the home of the Graves family. He doesn’t know how the key ended up in his toolkit, but that’s where he found it. He went back to the Graves home intending to return the key, but he was desperate for cash, and he stole some money from the safe in the Graves home. Quinn explains to Bricky how taking the money from the Graves safe has affected him.
. . . “And right away, I started to pay for it; boy, how I paid for it. Before I spent a nickel of it or got a block away, I was already paying for it through the nose. 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 . . .” (pages 56–57)
Bricky convinces Quinn to go back to the Graves home and return the money. She offers to go with him, and then she and Quinn can go back home to Iowa. Quinn and Bricky go to the Graves’s house to return the money, but Quinn finds one of the Graves family, a man, dead inside. Bricky convinces him to go back inside with her so they can find out what they can about the death. She is convinced that she will never have the strength to return to Iowa if Quinn doesn’t go back with her on the very next bus, which leaves at 6 a.m. Both are convinced that Quinn looks like the guilty party, that he will be arrested for the suspicious death inside the Graves house, and both become detectives to find the truth and spare Quinn.
Their decision alone seems improbable. Both are young and inexperienced. How will they ever find out what they need to know? But that’s what both of them set out to do, and readers have to be willing to go along and experience it with them. It takes a certain kind of person to take on this much responsibility, but Bricky and Quinn are equal to the task. They have more motivation than any reader: Bricky and Quinn are falling in love. Quinn, for instance, has second thoughts, but he decides that he cannot stop now because he doesn’t want to let Bricky down.
So he left her, and he struck out down the night-charred street, thinking: Oh, this is hopeless. It’s no use. Why not admit it, why not recognize it? If he’d been alone in it, he would have gone over to the park and planked down on a bench and waited for the daylight to come around, and for it to end that way. Or maybe he would have even beat the daylight to it by . . . walking around to the nearest police station and marching himself in.
But she was in it now, so he didn’t. She was in it now, so he kept going . . . (page 110)
I enjoyed Bricky and Quinn’s amateur investigation. It was difficult not to root for them. I wanted them to return to Iowa and build a life together.
Cornell Woolrich has a writing style that is clipped and bare bones; sometimes it seems that he purposely dropped words and telescoped his prose so that readers stumble a bit, which I found very distracting. But not all of that is the fault of the writer. I found five typos in three short paragraphs early in this particular edition of the novel. If readers are lucky, however, this series of mystery and pulp novels—American Mystery Classics from Penzler Publishers—will be a commercial success and all typos will be fixed in subsequent printings.
I saw the film noir based on Woolrich’s novel (it goes by the same title: Deadline at Dawn) many years ago, and I was looking forward to seeing it again now that I had read the book. The film is very different from the novel in some ways, and I had forgotten some great plot twists that are not part of the novel. The film and the novel stand well on their own merits, which I am finding true more and more often of novels and the films noir adapted from them.
Deadline at Dawn, by Cornell Woolrich • New York: Penzler Publishers, 2022 • Originally published in 1944 • Introduction by David Gordon
List of main characters: Bricky Coleman, taxi dancer • Quinn Williams, unemployed electrician’s assistant • Stephen Graves, oldest son in the Graves family • Roger Graves, Stephen’s younger brother • Harriet Graves, the matriarch • Mr. Carter, new father • Helen Kirsch • Harry Kirsch, Helen’s husband • Barbara, Stephen’s fiancée • Arthur Holmes, stockbroker • Joan Bristol, vaudevillian • Griff, Joan’s boyfriend
The image of the front cover is from the 2022 edition from Penzler Publishers. The page references in this article refer to the Penzler 2022 edition listed above.
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