"It Had to Be Murder" and Other Stories Literary Elements

Suspense/Crime thriller

Varies, but the typical setting is an American city in the 20th century with much of the action taking place at night.

Narration varies from third-person omniscience to first-person accounts. Regardless of narrative POV, the perspective in a Woolrich story is generally that of either a completely innocent person who has fallen under suspicion or a guilty person desperately trying to undo the circumstances which impulsive act has brought upon him.

The tone of a Woolrich story is perhaps surprisingly straightforward and to the point. Most of the stories are narrated in a just-the-facts sort of manner. It is the mood that is created as undertone that gives the stories their suspense and chilling quality. The mood is deeply ironic, morally ambiguous, and permeated by the reality that things can go very badly very quickly.

Protagonist: Usually an innocent person whose actions wind up causing them to fall under suspicion. Antagonist: While the antagonist is often a conscious agent working to throw suspicion on the innocent, as often as not law enforcement becomes a partner either through direct malevolence or simple incompetence.

The conflict at work in the bulk of the author’s short stories centers around the protagonist possessing information but not being able to prove it. This circumstances inevitably arouses mistrust which drives the plots of characters being forced to prove their innocence because nobody—especially the authorities—believes their story.

The climaxes of Woolrich’s short stories generally tend toward one of two types. In those revolving around an innocent not being believed, he reveals a surprisingly optimistic streak by resolving the conflict to that character’s advantage. On the other hand, many of his stories specifically work toward an ironic climax that is much darker and pessimistic, often to the point of the protagonist being killed.

“Three O’Clock” begins with an ironic foreshadowing as the protagonist thinks to himself, “She had signed her own death warrant.” Ultimately, he will prove to have signed his warrant for life imprisonment in an insane asylum.

In “Graves for the Living” the narrator is actually moved to comment on the quality of another person’s understated description of being buried alive which concludes with his observation that it “highly unpleasant while it lasts” by noting that this “was the most glaring case of understatement I had ever yet encountered.”

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“Dance it Off!” is a perfect example of the way that Woolrich sometimes likes to kick off a story with imagery related to a character that describes a character trait which will prove fruitful as the story plays out: “Wally Walters had been told more than once that he was a cake eater. Now a cake eater is one who having arrived at years of discretion toils not neither does he spin. In other words he lets the bread and butter of life go by him and concentrates on the cake—sugar icing and all.”

“Life is Weird Sometimes…” actually ends with the narrator calling attention to the contradictory nature of circumstances: “But the paradox of the whole thing was this: on the night that I committed a murder, I was only locked up on disorderly conduct charges.”

“Cinderella and the Mob” commences with the first-person narrator engaging parallelism in the service of an point about her position within the domestic structure: “The whole family jumped on me at once. You’d think I was a mere child or something, instead of sixteen. You’d think a person would have some rights on a Thursday evening. You’d think school-work was the most important thing in the world. You’d think—well anyway, you’d think!”

Throughout the stories of Woolrich, references to “the law” are used metonymically to cover the entire gamut of the judicial process. One typical example occurs in the story “Somebody on the Phone” when the narrator muses, “…somebody had killed her—by calling her up on the phone. The law mightn’t see it that way, but I did.”

Since most of the stories that Woolrich published were printed in pulp magazines which depended to a great extent on the lurid enticement of the title, there is a strong tendency toward using personification in those titles: “Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair,” “The Book that Squealed,” “Murder Always Gathers Momentum,” and “Money Talks” are just a sampling.