Madeline sits in her small room in the dark. She turns off the radio so she can hear her thoughts. Her dark thoughts. After a time, she goes to the closet and digs out a soft bag. Inside the soft bag is something hard. A gun. It was one of the few things her father left her when he died. The only thing of worth. He didn’t use it when he killed himself. He died by a slower method of suicide – alcohol. She’s not a drunk. She’s healthy. But her life hasn’t amounted to much more than her father’s. Without thinking much about it, she sticks the gun inside her mouth. Then she takes it out again. She doesn’t want to kill herself, does she? She has no reason to die. Yet again, she has no reason to really live. The gun goes back to her head.
Click.
The trigger is pulled but nothing happens. Suddenly she’s full of life. Thrilled that the gun didn’t fire. She really didn’t want to die. In her exultation, she tosses the gun on the table.
BANG!
It goes off, sending a bullet through the window. Out in the street, a woman lies dead. The bullet landed in her chest. Madeline lived while this stranger died.
And so Into the Night by Cornell Woolrich begins. Or perhaps I should say it begins in the hand of Lawrence Block. Into the Night was found as an unfinished manuscript in the estate of Cornell Woolrich not long after he died. Most of the story was completed save for maybe 20 pages at the beginning, a few lost pages here and there, and the ending.
Buy Into the Night by Cornell Woolrich and Lawrence BlockLawrence Block was tasked with completing it so that it could be published. Woolrich had indicated the essence of this beginning within the rest of the story. We know Madeline killed this woman by accident, so Block just supplied the details. Woolrich had scratched out some notes on how he wanted it to end, then scratched through those as if he wasn’t satisfied.
This new paperback from Hard Case Crime only lets us know that Block finished the manuscript started by Woolrich, but I had to do a little research to find out how much had been completed. Even then, I couldn’t find a complete breakdown of who wrote what. Had I not been told any of this, I would never have guessed it was written by two different authors in two different decades. I’ve admittedly never read anything by Woolrich (though I’ve admired the cinematic adaptations of his stories such as Rear Window and The Bride Wore Black). I’ve only read one book by Lawrence Block, Eight Million Ways to Die, the fifth book in the Matthew Scudder series. As such, I cannot consider myself an expert on either writer, but I didn’t notice any shifts in tone or language.
Once Madeline realizes she’s shot this woman, she first rushes to her side. But once she knows the woman is dead and as a crowd begins to gather, she retreats to her room. Then she waits. If the cops come calling, she’ll confess, but she’s not offering herself up to them. They never do come, and Madeline decides she owes this dead woman something. She needs to learn about who she was, and what she wanted out of life. Perhaps Madeline can live the life she wanted.
The dead woman’s name was Starr and she’d been living down and out. There was a husband, but she left him some time ago over some unknown but terrible grievance. And another woman, the husband’s former wife, may have had something to do with the grievance. Madeline decides to be the bringer of justice or as she puts it:
- To get even with a woman
- To kill a man
The book takes its time letting Madeline find her vengeance. Like a detective, she has to discover these details slowly, one at a time. Since all she knows in the beginning is that a woman has died outside her window, it is difficult going. She doesn’t have a name, or where she lived. She doesn’t know if she had a family or anything. But not being an actual detective, Madeline doesn’t have the tools to find out those answers easily. I quite enjoyed following her around the city as she slowly learns the truth about this woman she has accidentally killed. I liked spending time in this world with these characters.
From what I read, Lawrence Block took those scratched-out notes from Cornell Woolrich about the ending and went ahead and applied them to the story, in his own words. It is the ending that is a bit problematic. I won’t spoil it but it is quite a shock to learn why Starr walked away from her husband and how Madeline allows her story to conclude. It feels out of place inside the story and one can easily see why Woolrich may have not wanted to use it.
But the ending of a story isn’t the whole story. What gets us there can be good, too. And Into the Night is definitely good. I’d already planned on reading more Lawrence Block (I want to start those Matthew Scudder stories from the beginning this time, not the middle) and I’m now adding Woolrich to my list of authors to check out.
