The Black Angel

The Black Angel is a novel by the American writer Cornell Woolrich, published in 1943. Woolrich had a habit of turning his own short stories into full-length books, and this one was built out of two of them, Murder in Wax and Face Work. It was one of several novels he built this way, and the earlier versions differ enough from the book that it is not simply a longer copy of either of them.

Jerry Wheeler is the sister at the centre of it. She has been dancing in nightclubs to support herself and her younger brother Chick since she was sixteen, and she has been protective of him for years. When Chick is convicted of killing a singer named Ruby Rose, she has to find the real murderer before the sentence is carried out.

There is nobody else to do it. To get at the truth she insinuates herself into the lives and the affections of the people who were around the dead woman, including a nightclub owner who frightens her, and the novel follows her through a city where the people she needs are not the people she can trust.