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

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.