The Moon of Montezuma

Cornell Woolrich is "our greatest writer of Suspense Fiction" - Francis Nevins, Woolrich biographer.

The story is set in Mexico, a place where Woolrich spent nearly a decade of his childhood. To an isolated house in the valley comes a beautiful blond woman with a golden haired child with a Rosebud pinned to her coat. She's searching for her American husband who deserted her and to show him the baby he has never seen. Living in the house is an older Mexican woman and her lovely daughter, whose own baby has just died. But what the blonde woman doesn't learn until it's too late is that both babies have the same father. A murder, a burial and a rose bush that grows into a life of its own. Is it a witness to her crime? Woolrich's style in this particular story is vibrant, colorful and Frances Nevins, Woolrich's biographer, called it "poetic horror".

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (4 December 1903 – 25 September 1968) is one of America's best crime and noir writers who sometimes wrote under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley. He's often compared to other celebrated crime writers of his day, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler.

He attended New York's Columbia University but left school in 1926 without graduating when his first novel, "Cover Charge", was published. "Cover Charge" was one of six of his novels that he credits as inspired by the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Woolrich soon turned to pulp and detective fiction, often published under his pseudonyms. His best known story today is his 1942 "It Had to Be Murder" for the simple reason that it was adapted into the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie "Rear Window" starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly. It was remade as a television film by Christopher Reeve in 1998.