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.")