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.