IN A LONELY PLACE: DOROTHY B. HUGHES
“SHE KNEW HOW TRAPPED THINGS DIED, THEIR HEARTS POUNDING TOO HARD, THEIR BONES LIKE STICKS.”
-The So Blue Marble
If you are looking for a hard boiled, noir author of the highest order, one you’ve either never heard of or haven’t read, then find books by Dorothy B. Hughes. In the 1940s she wrote about a dozen crime thrillers, then took care of her family before returning, in 1962 with the superb ‘wrong man’ book, The Expendable Man. Most of them are out of print, but the best are available through Amazon. Go right now and order them! I’ve read four. Her first (her first publication, bless her, was poetry, but this isn’t about that) The So Blue Marble (can you believe that title?) is a brittle, Maltese Falcon-style pursuit of a McGuffin. This book is a bit thin but strong on plot and character. It’s true beauty is in its evocation of New York. Oh yes, and the relentless pace of the murders. The protagonist is a woman, in New York to visit her wealthy family. She is staying at her ex-husband’s apartment, a reporter away on a big story. The bodies pile up immediately, at the hands of mysterious European twins searching for a small blue marble, a whosiewatchie with ancient powers and a curse.  The style is not at all hard boiled, until the homicide detective and ex-husband show up. Suddenly Hughes is revealed as a deliberate and talented stylist. Hughes writes wonderful female characters. She has her molls and femmes fatales, true to the genre, but delivers much more.
The Fallen Sparrow is more sophisticated than The So Blue Marble, though it is also an international spy story set in NYC. This one deepens the dark quite a bit. There are murders, and a McGuffin (some priceless goblets) but the protagonist is a man who was imprisoned and tortured for two years by Spanish Fascists. The gang after the goblets are a bunch of émigrés, Nazis posing as the opposite. Again New York is rendered in all its beauty, snow in streetlights, cafes and bars and night clubs, cabs and subways. Hughes’ sense of place is unerring. The protagonist comes from a wealthy family, but PTSD has ground him down to a man out for vengeance. The suspense is quite intense and the voices of the novel range from upper-class icy, to gangster/cop hard boiled.
Her masterpiece is In A Lonely Place, made into a movie with Humphrey Bogart and directed by Nicholas Ray. The book is nothing like the movie. The book is about a serial killer in LA. It is narrated in the 3rd person, but totally from his point of view. This is a scary book. Unlike Jim Thompson (who seems to know altogether TOO much about serial killers) Hughes’ writing never flags. This is one of the most perfect novels I have ever read. The descriptions of LA are so solid I felt like I was driving along with the killer, or walking the dark roads he haunts. Much of the book limns his obsessive thoughts, his visions of grandeur, resentments, paranoid reflections, and strutting, in your face bravado. But to the rest of the world he is an ordinary man. Written before current psychological theories of psychopathology (which I have written about in this blog), it nevertheless invokes what today would be considered a text book case of a psychopath. Every encounter is fraught with menace. What struck me in this book is the way Hughes’ describes women through the killer’s eyes. All of her considerable skills as a writer are to the fore. She sees so much, the color and texture of fabrics, the furniture of rooms, the light in restaurants. And the visual detail is matched by the little thoughts he has doing ordinary things, how he takes a shot of rye to calm down, not because he needs it. Where his cigarettes are. The noises that drive him nuts, grinding bus gears, the whine of an electric razor. And the rage that grips his head.
The last novel she wrote came in 1962, The Expendable Man. If the book lacks what In Lonely Place possesses, it makes up for it in other ways. Set in Phoenix, it tells the story of a man who picks up a hitchhiker on his way from LA to Phoenix , a 15 year old girl who later turns up dead. There is a twist, famously. The driver is a doctor, who is black. The girl is white. He comes from a very respectable family, all of whom are painfully aware of their status, and their peril. Racial fear pervades every word as the doctor sets out to prove his innocence. This book is absolutely brilliant. All of them are.
Hughes was an accomplished journalist who lived in NY, LA and New Mexico. She died in the early 90’s. There is no biography that I can find, and that’s too bad. She deserves one. She deserves to be known with Hammett and Chandler, and Cain and Willeford and Thompson. She’s that good. Even better.
