Into the Night

TWO OF THE GREATEST AUTHORS OF NOIR FICTION IN AN UNFORGETTABLE COLLABORATION

An innocent woman lies dead in the street, felled by a stray bullet. Now it’s up to the woman who killed her to investigate the dead woman’s life and pick up its cut-short threads, carrying out a mission of vengeance on her behalf against the man she loved and lost - and the nightclub-singing femme fatale responsible for splitting them apart.

Begun in the last years of his life by noir master Cornell Woolrich, the haunted genius responsible for such classics as Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, and Phantom Lady, and completed decades later by acclaimed novelist and MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block (A Walk Among the Tombstones, Eight Million Ways to Die), INTO THE NIGHT - available here for the first time in more than 35 years -is a collaboration that extends beyond the grave, echoing the book’s own story of the living taking on and completing the unfinished work of the dead.

Cornell Woolrich is widely regarded as the twentieth century’s finest writer of pure suspense fiction. Author of numerous classic novels and short stories (many turned into classic films) such as Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, and I Married a Dead Man, Woolrich began writing in the 1920s with novels that won him comparisons to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The bulk of his best-known work, however, was written in the field of crime fiction, often appearing serialized in pulp magazines or as paperback novels. Because he was prolific, he found it necessary to publish under multiple pseudonyms, including ＂William Irish＂ and ＂George Hopley＂; it was under the latter name that he originally published Fright, and until Hard Case Crime’s edition it has never appeared under his real name. Woolrich lived a life as dark and emotionally tortured as any of his unfortunate characters and died, alone, in a seedy Manhattan hotel room following the amputation of a gangrenous leg. Upon his death, he left a bequest of one million dollars to Columbia University, to fund a scholarship for young writers.

LAWRENCE BLOCK is one of the most acclaimed and highly decorated living mystery writers, having received multiple Edgar, Shamus Awards and Maltese Falcon Awards, as well as lifetime achievement awards in the U.S., UK, and France (including being named a ＂Grand Master＂ by the Mystery Writers of America, the organization’s highest honor).