INTO THE NIGHT
By Cornell Woolrich & Lawrence Block
Hard Case Crime
240 pgs.
Madeline is an introspective young woman caught in the depths of depression. Toying with a loaded revolver, she contemplates taking her life. Then, when setting the gun down on a desk causes it to fire accidentally, the bullet goes out the window and hits an innocent bystander. In shock, Madeline rushes to the fallen body of the young woman she has shot and cradles her tenderly as she dies.
Fleeing the scene before the police arrive, Madeline then becomes obsessed with learning more about the dead woman’s name, Starr. With facts gathered surreptitiously from Starr’s mother, she discovers that Starr had once been happy. Then she’d suffered a broken heart due to some unspeakable act of her husband. Finding notes left behind by the deceased, Madeline concludes that Starr had wanted to murder the man and decides in her twisted sense of obligation to fulfill Starr’s wish. But first she has to return to the city and find her target.
Thus begins a grim, suspenseful odyssey original conceived by writer Cornell Woolrich, a master of the genre. When he died before the story could be completed, the manuscript collected dust for several decades until crime writer Lawrence Block agreed to take on the task of finishing it. That he does so brilliantly is evidence in the grim, noire styling that is uniform throughout the prose. The myriad characters Madeline encounters along her path to murder are all dour, soulless people caught up in a rat race they have personally chosen for themselves. The world “Into the Night” inhibits is one of hopelessness and ruin with death the only decent escape. It is a place both Cornell and Block are all too familiar with.
