Into the Night

June 26, 1987
The events leading to the publication of this book have their own elements of mystery. First, a corpus is discovered: the unpublished works of Cornell Woolrich, a popular writer of the 1940s, remembered for such classics as The Bride Wore Black and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes. In its midst is the torso of Into the Night, minus a beginning, end and a few other parts. Lawrence Block, author of the Matt Scudder and Evan Tanner series, is invited to fill in the blanks. The final product is a sort of Frankenstein that claims as its victims the reputations of both writers. The book tells the story of Madeline, a lonely girl who tries to commit suicide. When, to her relief, the gun jams, she tosses it on a table, causing it to discharge a bullet that flies through her window, crosses the street and kills Starr, a girl rather like herself. Filled with guilt, she digs into her victim's past and when she discovers that Starr has been emotionally slain by an ill-fated marriage, she determines to expiate her own crime by plotting the destruction of Starr's husband. Better editing might have expunged the book's conflicting statements, anachronisms and unbelievable coincidences, but one suspects that Woolrich knew exactly what he was doing when he put it aside.

March 15, 2024
Hard Case resurrects a dark tale that noir master Woolrich (1903-1968) left unfinished at his death, was completed 20 years afterward by Block, but has been unavailable for more than 35 years. Driven to the edge of suicide, Madeline Chalmers miraculously finds herself still alive when her late father's gun, which she's raised to her head, clicks on an empty chamber--then, jubilant, places it emphatically on a table and hears it fire, killing Starr Bartlett, a neighbor she's never met who happens to be passing on the city street outside. Consumed with guilt and determined to "live for Starr," Madeline worms her way into the confidence of Starr's mother, Charlotte, and learns everything she can about the young woman she killed. She decides to take revenge on singer Adelaide Nelson, who'd told Starr a terrible secret about her husband, Vick Herrick, that had abruptly ended Starr's marriage after less than two years--and, even more improbably, to track down Vick in order to kill him. The rest of the story, taking its cue from earlier Woolrich novels from The Bride Wore Black to Rendezvous in Black, follows Madeline as she works assiduously to visit doom on Adelaide, the other woman, and Vick himself. Although there's no editorial apparatus helping readers determine what Block added to what Woolrich had written, their two voices blend seamlessly in a claustrophobic pulp nightmare until the final sequence, which manages to be both more shocking and more softhearted than the endings of any of Woolrich's other novels. Readers will have no trouble figuring out why the author had trouble completing this one. Warts and all, this is required reading for fans of vintage noir.

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