“Once he’d had happiness but for so brief a time; happiness was made of quicksilver, it ran out of your hand like quicksilver. There was the heat of tears suddenly in his eyes and he shook his head angrily. He would not think about it, he would never think of that again. It was long ago in an ancient past. To hell with happiness. More important was excitement and power and the hot stir of lust. Those made you forget. They made happiness a pink marshmallow.” Dorothy B. HughesI’d known Dix Steele since the war, well since London anyway. He was hung up on this dame named Brucie then. A woman we all wished would look at us the way she looked at Dix, but there were plenty of dames for everyone. The British Roses were enamored with American pilots and believe you me we cut quite a swath through the lavender scented air. I lost track of Dix and then ran into him again in New York. He was with another dame, a long legged bit of sparkle that laughed when she was supposed to and knew how to touch a man just right to let him know she was interested. I was with some gal I’d met at the dry cleaners. She wasn’t pretty, but she was alright. Next to Dix’s bit of sparkle her clothes looked a little drab and her face, well she might have been prettier if she’d smiled once in a while. Dorothy, as it turned out, was fascinated with Dix. When the girls left for the bathroom which left me wondering if Dorothy’s dourness would rub off on the Sparkle or if the Sparkle would manage to loosen Dorothy up, Dix leaned in and said “whadya think”? “She’s gorgeous Dix.”“Not my dame. I was talking about your dame.”“Well she’s not my dame. We just met.”Dix had a terrible temper. I could see his face tighten and realized I wasn’t getting what was bothering him. “She keeps staring at me.”I leaned back and lit another cigarette. “Jesus, Dix, girls always do like you. I’m already jealous you’ve got the prettiest girl in here.” Dix had strong hands.He grabbed my arm and pulled me in closer. “It ain’t like that.” His fingers were like steel rods pressing my skin tightly against the bone. I shook him off feeling a momentary flare of my own anger. I drained the last of the Rye in my glass. “I’ll tell you what Dix we will shove off as soon as the girls get back.”I was expecting him to say something along the lines of that wouldn’t be necessary, but he just nodded to me and said: “That dame with the probing eyes would be a pleasure to throttle.”I pulled Dorothy aside before she could sit down. I could tell she was not happy to be leaving, but after another long look at Dix and then a look back at me she nodded her agreement. Dix was right about something. She did have eyes that looked deep inside a guy. As we were waiting for the coat check girl to bring our things she said to me: “Dix has issues with women.” I laughed. “Yeah, too many of them chasing him.”I had thought about taking her to another club. Maybe after a few more drinks she’d get a little more friendlier, but all she was interested in was Dix. She shotgunned questioned at me like she was going to write a book or something. I answered a few, but there was no end to her curiosity. I finally pulled over near her apartment and said: “You’re going to have to kiss me if I’m going to answer any more questions.”She pulled a face that put a damper on any pleasure I would have had from what I could only assume were cold, cold lips anyway. “It’s alright girly I don’t want a kiss you don’t want to give.”She scooted over closer to me. I put my arm around her and I could feel the wired energy running through her. She gave me a peck on the cheek that was more chaste than what a nun would have offered up to Jesus. I opened my door and stepped out. I reached in and helped her out. I thanked her for a lovely evening. She gave me one more probe of those dark eyes and then she walked away without acknowledging anything I’d said. That evening was the last time I saw Dix or Dorothy, but not the last time I heard of them. I was killing time in a bookstore, not because I read, but because I was dating a book seller with pale gold hair that shimmered sending shivers down to my toes. In a pyramid of books on the table at the front was a book by Dorothy B. Hughes, a name which sounded really familiar. I opened up the back and saw her picture. It was...the obsessed about Dix...Dorothy. I looked at the cover. IN A LONELY PLACE“Well I’ll be damned.” I heard a gasp from a blue haired battle ax with her hands over the ears of a young girl. I laughed and told them I was sorry. There was Dix’s name larger than life in the text. I bought my first book. It seems Dix was right about Dorothy being obsessed with him. She even followed him to Santa Monica, California. She published IN A LONELY PLACE as a novel, but from what I gathered from newspapers there was more truth than fiction in the book. I guess I always knew something was a little off about Dix, but I had no idea of what he was capable of. Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in the movie In a Lonely Place. (A really great movie that is under appreciated. )I went to see the movie too. I was a big fan of Humphrey Bogart. Gloria Grahame looked exactly like the kind of dame that always liked Dix. I had to admit I liked the movie better. They changed the plot, but that anger in Bogart’s face was the same cold fury I’d seen transform the pleasing features of Dix Steele into a mask of hate. It makes me feel a little queasy when I remember the glittering madness he showed me that night I was out with Dorothy and he said: “That dame with the probing eyes would be a pleasure to throttle.”I’m a novel reader now because of Dorothy B. Hughes. Who would think so much real life could be wrapped up in fiction? I married the bookseller not for the shimmering hair, but for the 40% discount on books.
THE SULTANA OF SUBVERSION: THREE HARD-BOILED NOVELS BY DOROTHY B. HUGHESThe serial killer Dix Steele in Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1947 noir classic In a Lonely Place professes to his friend Brub Nicolai, an LAPD detective assigned to the “strangler” case, to be writing a detective novel. Brub responds: “Who you stealing from, Chandler or Hammett or Gardner?”Hughes herself stole brilliantly from her fellow pulp writers, added her inimitable twist, and became the “Queen of Noir,” the “Mistress of Dark Suspense.” She, in turn, was stolen from by the likes of Jim Thomson, Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell, and Sara Paretsky. She wrote thirteen novels, of which three were adapted to film, most famously Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Placestarring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame.An award-winning poet and critic, Hughes worked for a time in Hollywood, including a stint on Hitchcock’s Spellbound. Her influences ranged beyond the masters of the genre to Dostoevsky, T.S. Eliot, Faulkner, and Shakespeare, but also to more obscure authors such as Anne Petry and Nella Larsen. For Hughes, any encounter with another writer’s work contributed to the shaping of her own, reading itself being the supreme influence.The above exchange between her characters Dix and Brub is, of course, self-referential, but the inward nod is particularly Hughesian because she’s identifying with her murderous protagonist and because Dix’s novel doesn’t exist. His imaginary opus is a ploy to pump Brub for information. Yet the novel we’re reading is a detective novel narrated from Dix’s point of view. Whose novel is it? In exquisitely noir fashion, Hughes’s fiction and Dix’s fiction become darkly entangled, and readers are compelled to question subjective reality. As a writer, Hughes is dead set — stylistically, thematically, narratively — on destabilizing our expectations and preconceptions as readers, as human beings. She is the Sultana of Subversion.As will happen with women writers, Hughes’s books fell out of print, nearly forgotten until 2004 when The Feminist Press launched the fabulous new series Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp, including informative essays by literary scholars. Two of Hughes’s novels The Blackbirder(1943) and In a Lonely Place were the lead titles.This month, New York Review Books is publishing Hughes’ last novel, The Expendable Man (1963), with an afterword by Walter Mosley. (Also available in the UK from the wonderful Persephone Books.)Whether Hughes’s name will ever be said in the same breath as Chandler and Hammett remains to be seen, but her revival is significant, not least because her books, from within a masculine, often misogynist literary genre, offer an alternative vision that might be described as feminist. (Hughes, who rejected classification, hated the term.) Her books not only refuse to cater to the “male gaze” so prevalent in popular culture, they include a critique of that gaze using the tools and tropes of popular fiction to expand our ways of seeing.Click here to continue reading at Bookslut
What do You think about In A Lonely Place (2003)?
A re-release by The Feminist Press --- recapturing women writers of an earlier era. Dorothy Hughes wrote pulp mysteries --- and the argument is that her presentation of a misogynistic serial killer (before the term 'serial killer' was adopted) is an examination of the normal misogynistic male of that era. I think that's pushing it, but it was an interesting read. The story is told completely from the p.o.v. of Dix Steele, an ex-WWII pilot, displaced upon his return to civilian life partially because he doesn't want to work for a living and partially because he misses the status he earned in the Air Force. Hughes first published book was one of poetry. She wrote over a dozen murder mysteries. This one was made into a movie of the same name.
—Beth
The Library of America has published a two-volume set of "Women Crime Writers", which includes four novels from the 1940s and four novels from the 1950s. I am enjoying working through the individual works in the collection which the Library of America has kindly provided to me for review. The third work in the 1940s volume is this 1947 suspense novel by Dorothy Hughes, "In a Lonely Place". It is an excellent novel, worthy of its new place in the LOA."In a Lonely Place" is one of the first novelistic explorations of a serial killer. The primary character, Dix Steele, had been a fighter pilot stationed in England during WW II. Hughes introduces the reader to Dix as he wanders the streets on the outskirts of Los Angeles on a rainy foggy September evening looking for a young woman to rape and murder. The first potential victim evades him, but he soon finds another. The plot is complicated when Dix reconnects with his former Air Force buddy Brub Nicholai, and his lovely and perceptive wife Sylvia. Brub has become a detective who is investigating the murders of young women which, unknown to him, his old friend Dix has committed. A loner who suppresses his feelings of violent rage, Dix has become involved with a young divorced redhead, Laura, with a flair for high living. Dix's passion for Laura leads to his downfall.Although narrated in the third person, Hughes' novel manages to get inside the mind and heart of Dix Steele. Hughes' taut, hardboiled writing makes the reader understand her chilling character and almost feel sympathy for him. Even with his old friendship with Brub and his attempted love affair with Laura, Dix is an essential loner and a killer, wandering the streets and isolated beaches at night, driving his car through the rain, and plotting his murders. Here is one of many passages in which the author gets inside her character as Dix remembers a woman he had loved while stationed in England."He drove away not knowing where he was going or why. Only to get away. He did not know how far he drove or how long. There was no thinking in his mind; there was only sound, the swish of the dark wet water over the cold sand, colder than Brucie; the water was the voice of a girl, a voice hushed by fear, repeating over and over , no ... no .. no. Fear wasn't a jagged split of light cleaving you; fear wasn't a cold fist in your entrails; fear wasn't something you could face and demolish with your arrogance. Fear was the fog, creeping about you, winding its tendrils about you, seeping into your pores and flesh and bone. Fear was a girl whispering a word over and again, a small word you refused to hear although the whisper was a scream in your ears, a dreadful scream you could never forget. You heard it over and again and the fog was a ripe red veil you could not tear away from your eyes. Buucie was dead. Brucie whom he had loved, who was his only love."The novel gives a portrayal of the anomie that affected many young men after they returned from the war, including those who undertook to live productive lives. The book also portrays Los Angeles in the late 1940s. However this is primarily a work of noir as it portrays the mind of a serial murderer.The LOA volume includes a biographical sketch of Dorothy Hughes (1904 1993) Hughes began her writing career as a journalist and a poet: a 1931 volume "Dark Certainty" won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Beginning in 1940, Hughes wrote a long series of suspense novels. She was named a "Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America" in 1978. In her later years, she wrote a biography of Eric Stanley Gardner. In 1950, "In a Lonely Place" was made into a celebrated film noir directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame..I found "In a Lonely Place" the highlight of the LOAs collection of women's suspense writing from the 1940s. It is an outstanding book which creates suspense and probes the soul. The LOA has done a service in making this book accessible in its new anthology.Robin Friedman
—Robin Friedman
In an introduction to a collection of his mystery stories,Isaac Asimov dismisses the sort of mystery novel in which we know who the killer is all along as a sort of wallowing in pathological psychology. He himself wrote mysteries in what he, somewhat self-servingly, called the traditional mode - puzzle stories that were far removed from the actual scene of any crime and had various conundrums presented and solved during the course of polite dinner-table chat. The implication was that a novel like this holds only a morbid interest, a kind of voyeuristic thrill. While I enjoy Asimov's brand of mysteries for what they are, I disagree with his literary opinions. We get an inkling of the killer's identity early on in this novel; it soon becomes a certainty, and as the killer goes about his madness, we wait to see when the police will find him out. But it isn't just a case of sadistic wallowing; in fact, all the killings are off-stage and the focus is less on the killing as on an overall portrait of a psyche bent just that little bit more out of shape than anyone else's. Contrary to the popular image of serial killers as Hannibalesque geniuses, I've always noticed that most serial killers tend to be people with limited minds but powerful impulses, and Hughes offers a chilling portrait of just such a man in this novel. I won't suggest that this novel redeems itself by being a psychological case study; but it does delve into the nature of an evil man in ways that provoke as much serious thought about morality and ethics a they do the shudders and gasps that a good suspense novel deals in. Hughes was a brilliant writer, able to fully inhabit her characters' mental world and to tell a taut, engaging story with a great balance of interior and exterior detail. Her characters make sense and her plot is gripping. An yes, a mystery is solved along the way. This isn't just an excursion into a deranged mind - it's literature wrapped up in genre and equally good in both roles. I'd easily rank this novel along with The Killer Inside Me, The Big Sleep and Red Harvest as one of the finest noir novels I've read yet. There's a time and a place for tidy little puzzles, but that doesn't mean that a crime novel that hinges more on characterisation is just an excuse for visceral hi-jinks. Writers like Hughes do us a great service by stripping away the veneer and bringing us face to face with familiar monsters, monsters who are familiar because looking at them is like gazing into a warped mirror.
—Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
