Tonight, Somewhere in New York: The Last Stories and an Unfinished Novel [Hardcover]

Cornell Woolrich (Author), Francis M. Nevins (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 4, 2005

Cornell Woolrich reinvented suspense fiction for the twentieth century. His unnerving tales of the psychological terrors lurking on the underside of the commonplace earned Woolrich epithets like "our poet of the shadows," the twentieth century's Edgar Allen Poe, and the father of noir. The twilight years of Woolrich's career did not soften his vision; they darkened it, as the selections in Tonight, Somewhere in New York, rivetingly show. In addition to nine masterly stories from the late 1950s and 1960s, some of them never before collected, this Woolrich anthology offers two evocative episodes from the autobiographical manuscript on which he worked during his latter years as well as five chapters of the novel he left unfinished at the time of his death in 1968. Page after suspenseful page, this collection amply demonstrates the power of his vision. Again and again, ordinary individuals get caught up in everyday circumstances that spin perversely, murderously, out of control. Unexpected perils lie in wait everywhere—in a hotel corridor, in the insistent ring of a telephone, on a street one day in Rome, or inside a black sedan that without wheels would look like a coffin.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Woolrich biographer and novelist Nevins does noir lovers a genuine service with his second anthology of stories by one of the masters of psychological suspense and terror. The quality of the fiction gathered here is higher than that of his previous collection, 2004's Night and Fear, and fairly represents Woolrich's exceptional gift for crafting claustrophobic situations and the shattered lives of the desperate. Long-time fans will simultaneously relish and be frustrated by the volume's high point: five, nonconsecutive chapters of an incomplete novel. Woolrich's exceptional hard-boiled prose ("His necktie was patterned in regimented stripes, but they were perhaps the wrong regiments, selected from opposing armies."), and his pervasive and compelling, if depressing fatalistic worldview will inspire newcomers to seek out his other works. Even though this is not the absolute best work of the man Nevins justifiably calls "the Hitchcock of the written word," these stories are head-and-shoulders above most others in the genre and richly deserve this reprinting, enhanced by Nevins' scholarly notes.
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From Booklist

Woolrich's unhappy life reads like one of the tragic pulp tales he wrote. Abandoning his dreams of becoming the next F. Scott Fitzgerald, he found success with crime and suspense, genres he disdained. From 1934 to 1948, he was prolific and published, helping to shape the nascent noir genre--until his creative ability disappeared. The awkward man who lived with his mother became a recluse until his death, in 1968, but even when he didn't publish, he still wrote sporadically, as if by compulsion. Tonight, Somewhere in New York collects miscellany from Woolrich's long twilight: an unfinished novel by the same name (alternately titled The Loser), nine short stories, and two autobiographical pieces. Some pieces have never been published before, while others have never been collected. Unavoidably, the quality is so-so. There are glimpses of Woolrich's better days (parts of the novel are compelling) and stories that are third-rate ("The Penny-a-Worder"). Especially as the novel is incomplete, interest in this book will be limited to Woolrich fans and pulp completists. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf (August 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786715308
• ISBN-13: 978-0786715305
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #923,320 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Woolrich Jubilee, February 19, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tonight, Somewhere in New York: The Last Stories and an Unfinished Novel (Hardcover)

It's great to have so much of THE LOSER here, for though we've had bits and pieces of it over the years since Woolrich's death, never have we been able to see the whole manuscript. Nevins has renamed it TONIGHT SOMEWHERE IN NEW YORK, an earlier title Woolrich abandoned, I'm not sure why.

Nevins is a great partisan of Woolrich's and it would be worth buying this book if only for his introduction, in which he displays his superb find, meeting and making the acquaintance of the psychiatrist Carlos Burlingham, who was able to provide him with tons of new information about Woolrich's mysterious father. I think a new biography is in order, but in the meantime we can all piece things together in a different way than we have before. Nevins dates the beginning of the decline in Woolrich's writing to 1948, a year when he heard his father had died, and he surmises that for some reason, Woolrich perhaps wanted to prove something to his dad, and when Woolrich Senior passed on, that exigency wasn't so important any more . . . thus the strange, sad silence of the last twenty years.

I think however Nevins is trying to have it both ways. Bombastically he dismisses the final 20 years as a period in which Woolrich wrote little of value, while on the other hand having the temerity to try to sell the present book, written during exactly the same period!

For one thing, the outright dismissal is too sweeping. Despite what Nevins says, such late products as STRANGLERS SERENADE, SAVAGE BRIDE and HOTEL ROOM are actually very good. Personally I prefer SERENADE to any of Woolrich's other novels. And what came before wasn't all that great--or at least as consistently great as Nevins argues. Like all artists, Woolrich had his ups and downs--and even within the same novel this is so.

I notice that he drops the homosexual angle from Woolrich's career this time around, without a word of explanation. Has Woolrich somehow been "de-gayed" for the new century? Had Nevins found "The Idol with the Clay Bottom" good enough to reprint, we would not be so susceptible to the newly minted heterosexual model of Cornell Woolrich. Check it out, everyone (it's one of the stories in the unjustly impugned late collection "The Dark Side of Love.")

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WONDERFUL AND TRAGIC!, July 8, 2007

By 

Milan Simich - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tonight, Somewhere in New York: The Last Stories and an Unfinished Novel (Hardcover)

I love reading 'crime', 'mystery', 'noir' novels. After I finish, no matter how I much I enjoyed them, I give the copies away. But with Woolrich's novels and short stories, like with Raymond Chandler's, I keep them and reread them. They are Tragic, Haunting.... This is a wonderful book and the unfinished novel is heart barking.