Into the Night

Afterword by Francis M. Nevins, Jr

On September 25, 1968, in a corridor of Manhattan’s Sheraton Russell Hotel, a one-legged man in a wheelchair suffered a stroke. He was sixty-four years old but looked almost ninety. His name was Cornell Woolrich. He was the greatest writer of suspense fiction that ever lived. His two dozen novels and more than two hundred short stories and novelettes had the same wrenching impact, the same resonance of terror and anguish and loneliness and despair, as the darkest films of his cinematic soul-brother, Alfred Hitchcock. He had spent most of his adult years living in a residential hotel with his mother, trapped in a bizarre love-hate relationship with her and in the quicksand of his own homosexual self-contempt. When she died, he cracked, and began his own slow journey to the grave.

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich was born in New York City on December 4, 1903, to parents whose marriage collapsed in his youth. He spent much of his childhood in Mexico with his father, a civil engineer. When he was eight, his maternal grandfather took him to Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts to see a traveling French company perform Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. The experience gave the young Woolrich his first insight into color and drama, and his first sense of tragedy. Three years later, on a night when he looked up at the low-hanging stars from the valley of Anahuac, he understood that someday, like Cio-Cio-San, he too would have to die. From that moment on he was haunted by a sense of doom. “I had that trapped feeling,” he wrote in his unfinished autobiography, “like some sort of a poor insect that you’ve put inside a downturned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can’t, and it can’t, and it can’t.”

During his adolescence he lived with his mother and aunt and maternal grandfather in the grandfather’s ornate house on 113th Street, near Morningside Park, a short walk from Columbia University. In 1921 he entered Columbia College as a journalism major, with his father paying the tuition from Mexico City. During a protracted illness in his junior year he began experimenting with writing fiction, scrawling the first draft of a novel in pencil on sheets of loose yellow paper that he scrounged from around the house. From the beginning he was a rapid, white-heat writer. “The stream of words was like an electric arc leaping across the intervening space from pole to opposite pole, from me to paper... It was tiring and it wouldn’t let go... You couldn’t stop it, it had to stop by itself. Then it fizzled out again at last, as unpredictably as it had begun. It left me feeling spent...”

By the time he was well enough to return to school he’d become a writing addict. Every evening from nine until midnight he’d sit in a second-floor room and scribble furiously — the door closed, the family out of hearing, a Burmese elephant-head lamp lit on a pedestal in the corner behind him. By late spring of 1924 the first draft of his first novel was done, and he borrowed a friend’s typewriter to turn it into readable form. When the novel found a publisher, Woolrich quit Columbia to pursue his dream of bright lights, gay music, and a meteoric literary career like that of his whole generation’s cultural idol, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Woolrich’s early mainstream fiction is saturated with the Fitzgerald influence, especially the first novel, Cover Charge (1926). It chronicles the lives and loves of the Jazz Age’s gilded youth — the child-people, flitting from thrill to thrill, conversing in a mannered slang which, sixty years later, reads like the gibberings of creatures from another galaxy. But if nothing else, the novel is eerily prophetic in the way its protagonist’s fate foreshadows its author’s. Ballroom dancer Alan Walker winds up alone, in a cheap hotel room, his legs all but useless after a drunken auto smash-up, abandoned by all the women he loved, contemplating suicide. “I hate the world,” he cries out. “Everything comes into it so clean and goes out so dirty.”

This debut novel was followed by Children of the Ritz (1927), a frothy concoction about a spoiled heiress’s marriage to her chauffeur, which won Woolrich a $10,000 prize and a contract from First National Pictures for the movie rights. He was invited to Hollywood to help with the adaptation and stayed on as a staff writer. Besides his movie chores (for which he never received screen credit) and an occasional story or article for magazines like College Humor and Smart Set, he completed three more novels during these years. Early in 1931, after a brief, inexplicable and disastrous marriage to a producer’s daughter, Woolrich fled back to Manhattan and his mother. His last mainstream novel, Manhattan Love Song (1932), anticipates the motifs of his later fiction with its love-struck young couple cursed by a malignant fate which leaves one dead and the other desolate.

Over the next two years he became one more victim of the Depression. He sold next to nothing and was soon deep in debt, reduced to sneaking into movie palaces by the fire doors for his entertainment. What he didn’t know was that he was on the brink of a new creative life, that he was about to become the foremost suspense writer of all time.

It was in 1934 that Woolrich decided to abandon his hopes of mainstream literary prestige and concentrate on the lowly genre of mystery fiction. He sold three stories to pulp magazines that year, ten more in 1935, and was soon an established professional whose name was a fixture on the covers of Black Mask, Detective Fiction Weekly, Dime Detective and other pulps. The more than one hundred stories and novelettes which he sold to the pulps during the Thirties are richly varied in type, including quasi-police procedurals, rapid-action whizbangs, and encounters with the occult. But the best and the best known of them are the tales of pure edge-of-the-seat suspense. Even their titles signal their predominant mood of bleakness and despair: “I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes,” “Speak to Me of Death,” “All at Once, No Alice,” “Dusk to Dawn,” “Men Must Die,” “If I Should Die Before I Wake,” “The Living Lie Down with the Dead,” “Charlie Won’t Be Home Tonight,” “You’ll Never See Me Again.” These and dozens of other Woolrich suspense stories evoke with fierce power the desperation of those who walk the city’s darkened streets and the terror that lurks at noonday in commonplace settings. In his hands even such clichéd storylines as the race to save the innocent man from the electric chair and the amnesiac’s search for his lost self pulsate with human anguish. Woolrich’s world is a feverish place where the prevailing emotions are loneliness and fear, and the prevailing action a race against time and death. His most characteristic detective stories end with the discovery that no rational account of events is possible, and his suspense stories tend to close with the terror not dissipated but omnipresent.

The typical Woolrich settings are the seedy hotel, the cheap dance hall, the run-down movie house and the precinct station backroom. The overwhelming reality in his world, at least during the Thirties, is the Depression. Woolrich has no peer at putting us inside the skin of a frightened little guy in a tiny apartment with no money, no job, a hungry wife and children, and anxiety eating him like a cancer. If a Woolrich protagonist is in love, the beloved is likely to vanish in such a way that the protagonist not only can’t find her but can’t convince anyone she ever existed. Or, in another classic Woolrich situation, the protagonist awakens after a blackout — the result of amnesia, drugs, hypnosis or whatever — and little by little becomes certain that he committed a murder or other crime while out of himself. The police are rarely sympathetic; in fact, they are the earthly counterpart of the malignant powers above, and their main function is to torment the helpless.

Woolrich suggests that the only thing we can do about this nightmare in which we live is to create, if we are very lucky, a few islands of love and trust to sustain us and help us forget. But love dies while the lovers go on living, and Woolrich excels at portraying the corrosion of a once beautiful relationship. Yet he created very few irredeemably evil characters; if one loves or needs love, Woolrich makes us identify with that person, all of his or her dark side notwithstanding.

Purely as technical exercises, many of Woolrich’s novels and stories are awful. They don’t make the slightest bit of sense. And that’s the point: neither does life. Nevertheless some of his tales, usually thanks to outlandish coincidence, manage to end quite happily. But since he never used a series character, the reader can never know in advance whether a particular Woolrich story will be light or dark, will end in triumph or despair — which is one of many reasons why his work is so hauntingly suspenseful.

In 1940 Woolrich joined the migration of pulp mystery writers from lurid-covered magazines to hardcover books, but his suspense novels carry over the motifs, beliefs and devices that energized his shorter fiction. The eleven novels he published during the Forties — six under his own by-line, four as William Irish and one as George Hopley — are unsurpassed classics in the poetry of terror. The Bride Wore Black. The Black Curtain. Black Alibi. Phantom Lady. The Black Angel. Deadline at Dawn. The Black Path of Fear. Night Has a Thousand Eyes. Waltz into Darkness. Rendezvous in Black. I Married a Dead Man. These titles, all published between 1940 and 1948, make up the finest group of suspense novels ever written.

Those were his peak years, in which he became a wealthy man and a superstar of his genre. Publishers began issuing hardcover and paperback collections of his shorter fiction, which then came to the attention of the story editors of the great dramatic radio series of the Forties, leading to dozens of Woolrich-based dramas on Suspense and Mollé Mystery Theatre and similar programs. Meanwhile Hollywood rediscovered the “boy wonder” of the Twenties and paid him handsomely for the right to make movies out of large numbers of his novels and stories. These pictures helped shape the uniquely Forties brand of suspense movie known today as film noir. But all the money and adulation didn’t make Woolrich happy. In a letter of February 2, 1947, to Columbia’s poet and professor Mark Van Doren, he seemed to blame his unhappiness on the fact that he was revered only as a mystery writer, not as a literary figure. “I don’t like to look back on the Columbia days for that reason; the gap between expectation and accomplishment is too wide.” On the other hand, impenetrable as the shield of self-contempt was with which Woolrich had surrounded himself, it’s unlikely he would have been any happier if he had been acclaimed as another Scott Fitzgerald.

Around the end of the Forties Woolrich’s mother became seriously ill, and that combined with his personal problems seemed to paralyze his ability and desire to write. During the Fifties he published very little, but he and his mother continued to live in their comfortable isolation, for his magazine stories proved to be as adaptable to television as they’d been to radio a decade earlier, and almost all the classic TV dramatic series — Robert Montgomery Presents, Ford Theater; Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Climax! even the prestigious Playhouse 90 — offered live or filmed versions of his fiction.

The day his mother died in 1957 was the day he began to die himself, but in his case the process dragged on for more than ten years. Diabetic, alcoholic, racked by loneliness and self-hate, he dragged out the last years of his life. He continued to write but left unfinished much more than he completed, and the only new work that saw print in the Sixties was a handful of final “tales of love and despair.” He developed gangrene in his leg and let it go untended for so long that when he finally sought medical help the doctor had no choice but to amputate. After the operation he lived for a few months in a wheelchair, unable to learn how to walk on an artificial leg. He had “the stunned aspect of the very old,” said science fiction writer Barry N. Malzberg, who was as close to Woolrich at the end as anyone could get. “Where there had been the edges there was now only the gelatinous material that when probed would not rebound.” But his eyes were still “open and moist, curiously childlike and vulnerable.”

It ended on September 25, 1968, two and a half months short of his sixty-fifth birthday. By the time the ambulance brought him from the Sheraton Russell corridor to Wickersham Hospital he was dead. He left no survivors. His funeral was attended by exactly five people.

The handful of tales he completed in his last years was by no means all he wrote during that period. Among his papers were found the typescripts of four works more or less in progress. He had finished several chapters of a heavily fictionalized autobiography he called The Blues of a Lifetime; some sections of a few mainstream stories he intended to use in a collection entitled I Was Waiting for You; the three key chapters of a novel with the quintessentially Woolrichian title The Loser; and the book you are holding in your hands.

I first read Into the Night around 1970, soon after becoming a consultant to the Woolrich estate, and said in print a year or so later (in my 1971 Woolrich collection Nightwebs) that I thought it contained some of the most haunting scenes Woolrich had written in the last twenty years of his life. Now that the book has been completed and published I see no reason to change that view. Woolrich may have thought that at last he was giving up suspense fiction and going back to his mainstream origins, but Into the Night is clearly in the direct line of descent from his classic thrillers of the Forties. Madeline Chalmers’ guilt-racked entry into the life of the young woman she accidentally killed, her rage to avenge the earlier mangling of that young woman’s life by a third woman and by a man, the way she takes on new identities and insinuates herself into the worlds of the two she lives to destroy (and falls in love despite herself with the man she feels compelled to kill) — none of this will surprise readers who are familiar with Woolrich’s great Vengeance Woman suspensers The Bride Wore Black (1940) and The Black Angel (1943). Like his last two short stories of pure tension — “For the Rest of Her Life” (1968) and “New York Blues” (1970) — Into the Night proves that even in those final and most wretched years of his life Woolrich hadn’t lost the magic touch that chills the heart. It’s immensely satisfying to see this powerful novel in print.

But how much of it (you must surely be wondering) is by Woolrich, and how much by Lawrence Block?

During the several years he worked intermittently on the book, Woolrich apparently became dissatisfied with its opening pages and threw them away. The typescript as we have it, which is now in the Rare Book and Manuscript Division of the Columbia University Library, starts on the twenty-third page, with the words: “Madeline stood there motionless for a long time after...” Every word of the published text from the beginning till that point (on page 14 of this edition) is by Block.

The bulk of the rest of the book is Woolrich’s work, with no more editing than would have been called for if he’d lived to complete it himself. However, pages 73, 75–78, 83, 87–88, and 100–101 are also missing from the typescript, and Block had to fill in the gaps of the scenes between Madeline and the singer Adelaide Nelson. He is responsible for the following segments of the published text.

“‘What do you mean?’” (p. 46) to “The other Dell was quieter, less forceful. And” (p. 50).

“‘I wind up someday with too much rust in my pipes’” (p.52) to “‘The last thing I need is somebody walking in at the wrong moment’” (p. 54).

“‘What the hell,’ she said” (p. 56) to “‘How did the two of you meet?’” (p. 56).

““‘The thing is,” he says,’” (p. 63) to “‘while your mind just spins like a top.’” (p. 64).

The next gap in the Woolrich typescript comes during the dialogue between Madeline and Mrs. Fairfield, and the published text from “‘I don’t suppose most people deliver’” (p. 110) to “the address listed for V. Herrick, on Lane Street” (p. 110) is Block’s. When the wrong Herrick tells Madeline of his sexual mutilation during World War II, a few hundred words of the scene (from “ ‘Just a little patch of hell’” on p. 115 to “‘My God,’ she breathed” on p. 116) come from Block. The last five brief paragraphs of the scene on page 125 where Madeline discovers the photograph from Vick’s studio are likewise Block contributions. Nothing else has been added to the typescript until we reach the climax.

There is no end to the typescript as we have it. As of Woolrich’s death, the story of these tormented people stops with the words “which had the advantage of not taking time” on page 170 of the published text. From there until the end, the author of Into the Night is Lawrence Block. And if there’s a single problem with what overall is a magnificent job of matching Woolrich’s structure and style and spirit, it’s with these final pages, which to me at least seem too neat to fit what has gone before.

Block chose an upbeat ending because he felt he had to in view of the last two pages of the typescript as we have it, pages from which Woolrich crossed out all but a few words but which are still readable beneath his deletion marks, and which prove beyond dispute that at least for a while during the project Woolrich had an extremely sentimental happy ending in mind. However, those who think the story should close more darkly can point to one hint in those crossed-out pages. Madeline and Vick come together again, but he calls her Starr. If this is not an oversight on Woolrich’s part, it suggests all sorts of possibilities: That Vick’s near-fatal confrontation with Madeline has pushed him over the edge. That he thinks Madeline is the original Starr, come back from the dead. That Madeline completes her atonement by accepting the role, undoing what she’d done at the start of the book, making the woman she’d killed return to life and to Vick’s arms, with all the incestuous overtones that implies. Here is the kind of twisted, perverse, downbeat ending which, if he’d lived long enough to work out all the bugs, Woolrich perhaps would have opted for. Or maybe it’s just a typo after all.

“I was only trying to cheat death,” Woolrich wrote in a fragment found among his papers. “I was only trying to surmount for a little while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and obliterate me. I was only trying to stay alive a little brief while longer, after I was already gone.” In the end of course he had to die, as we all do. But as long as there are readers to be haunted by the phantoms of his life, by the way he took his wretched psychological environment and his sense of entrapment and solitude and turned them into poetry of the shadows, the world that Woolrich imagined lives.