Into the Night

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.