Into the Night

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.