Review by C.J. Bunce
No doubt you recall Alfred Hitchcock’s great masterpiece, the dark and shocking noir suspense thriller Into the Night, based on the novel by Cornell Woolrich… the movie that finally earned Hitchcock his directing Oscar and re-ignited the career of Gene Tierney, who earned her first of many Oscars. Her narration of the path of a deeply troubled woman and Hitchcock’s deft direction are the stuff of film school classes to this day.
Or maybe you don’t recall any of this, because it never happened–at least not in this timeline. Cornell Woolrich, now best known for writing the short story that inspired Hitchcock’s Rear Window, didn’t finish his novel Into the Night, and it got shuffled with his effects and rolled up in his estate upon his death. Why didn’t he finish the novel? It is a literary masterpiece, the kind of suspense story that leans into the tools that wouldn’t work in the hands of a weaker writer. At least we can be happy his estate tapped Edgar Award-winning author Lawrence Block to come along and complete his work, first published in the 1980s. Out of print for 35 years, Into the Night returns next month as the latest “lost” noir novel from Hard Case Crime. It’s available now for pre-order here at Amazon.
The lead protagonist is Madeline Chalmers, a deeply disturbed young woman lonely and lost, believing she has nothing left to live for. As part of a botched suicide attempt her gun accidentally fires into the street, killing a passerby. The guilt is too great for Madeline, and she convinces herself the only answer is not taking the place of the dead woman, but fulfilling her final wishes. She maneuvers her way into the dead woman’s life and learns she was betrayed by a jilted lover of her husband, and her husband, too. For Madeline that means she at last has a purpose: she will kill them both.
Madeline is stuck like Kim Novak’s young actress in Vertigo but much further into a place of darkness and despair. Something happened to her that is not discussed to get her to this point, maybe something like Tippi Hedrin’s Marnie in Hitchcock’s psychological film of the same name. A great actress from the black and white era could have made a splash with a role like Madeline’s.
Cornell’s characterization, setting, and literary merit is impeccable. He was a master of storytelling something like Ian Fleming, yet Cornell exhibited a stunning understanding of writing women characters–most of the characters in the story are women. Cornell writes every scene through the sharp yet disturned eye of Madeline. A few scenes carry coincidences that might not work from someone else, but his use here only builds on Madeline’s incredibly nuanced, tragic, anti-heroine. This is exactly the stuff of a Hitchcock movie. It has elements of Otto Preminger’s Laura, another haunting story about a ghost of sorts who is watching somehow the entire way through the story. And Madeline is made from the same bolt of cloth as Clifton Webb’s Waldo Lydecker–it’s the certainty of action, purpose, and twisted logic that ties them together.
No, the book never became a movie, but what a movie it could have been. This is vintage noir in every sense. And Gene Tierney would have been perfect in the part, as this is a better story for a murderess type than her character in Leave Her to Heaven. There’s even a part here for a middle-aged Barbara Stanwyck as the crazed, jilted, showbiz type–the first target on Madeline’s to-do list.
You won’t be able to put this one down. It’s a gritty, surprising, shocking crime story on par with Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown, and the works of Donald E. Westlake and Erle Stanley Gardner that audiences in the 1940s never would have been able to stop talking about (only its references point to it being created in the early 1960s). It’s nearly perfect at assembling all the noir tropes, and the detailed view of the story from Madeline’s perspective would require a classic voiceover narration if adapted. It’s been written that the beginning of Woolrich’s draft was missing along with pieces throughout the original work, but it will be impossible to discern Lawrence Block’s contributions from Woolrich (much like Max Allan Collins’ great finishes of Mickey Spillane unfinished novels, also published by Hard Case Crime).
Put Into the Night at the top of your must-read list. One of Hard Case Crime’s best finds and featuring a spot-on painted cover by Gregory Manchess, it’s available for pre-order now here at Amazon, slated for release May 7, 2024.
