Deadly Night Call

by William Irish (pseud.), Cornell Woolrich

Paperback abridgment of Somebody on the Phone (1950).
Contains:
-Johnny on the Spot
-Somebody on the Phone
-Momentum
-Boy with Body
-Death Sits in the Dentist's Chair
-The Room with Something Wrong
(Omitted are "Collared" and "The Night I Died" from Somebody on the Phone.)

A MAN is struck with terror because his sister won't answer the telephone....
A healthy patient keels over and dies in the dentist's chair....
Another man sits alone in a cafeteria at 3:45 A.M., brooding over the probability that his wife will be a widow before she is 19....
Six new stories featuring violence, superb detection and fresh angles by William Irish, winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for "sustained excellence" in mystery writing.

Genres: Short Stories, Pulp

190 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1950

About the author

pseudonym of Cornell Woolrich

Reviews

[Erin Bodishbaugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

For the most part, the stories in this collection were solid, pulpy mystery-thrillers. Some of them, though, left me a little cold. Boy With Body, for example, dismisses the murder of an adulterous woman as inevitable and deserved because of her indiscretions, then focuses on the completely boring scheme to dispose of her body. And the ending of The Room With Something Wrong is so absurd that it completely ruins the electricity that had been building up throughout the whole story, turning it into a farce.

The title story, though, is a short but great little chiller; and the story Momentum is a dark, Coen Brothers-type fiasco.