Moran, a married businessman with a young son, is left alone with his child when his wife is decoyed out of town by a false telegram Julie then shows up claiming to be the boy's kindergarten teacher and there to help the family, and then tricks Moran into going into a small closet which she then locks and blocks the cracks with putty, so he suffocates. Mitchell, a lonely romantic living in a squalid residential hotel, is drawn out by her mysterious charm and poisoned. Corey, another guest, tries to romance her, but she deflects his interest, and lures Bliss onto the balcony when they are alone, she pushes him off and calmly leaves before anyone discovers what happened. Bliss, a well-off ladies' man, is celebrating his engagement as she crashes the party. Over the next two years, she appears in the lives of various men and kills them. She takes a room under an assumed name and erases all trace of her identity. She bids farewell to her family and friends but gets off at the next station. Julie, a grief-stricken woman, announces she is leaving the city and buys a random train ticket. The structure of the novel, Woolrich's first as a 'pulp' writer, is discussed by Eddie Duggan in his article 'Writing in the Darkness: The World of Cornell Woolrich Plot The novel opens with a quote from Guy de Maupassant's short story ' Le Horla' (in English as 'The Diary of a Madman'): 'For to kill is the great law set by nature in the heart of existence! There is nothing more beautiful and honorable than killing!' In 1968, The Bride Wore Black was adapted into a film of the same name by the French director François Truffaut. Although it was Woolrich's seventh published novel, it was the first in the noir/pulp style for which he would become known, his previous novels having been Jazz Age fiction about the wealthy and privileged. The Bride Wore Black is a 1940 American novel written by Cornell Woolrich, initially published under the pseudonym William Irish.

The bride wore black cornell woolrich