Dorothy B. Hughes's 1947 In a Lonely Place (reissued by New York Review Books Classics) suggests that the current ongoing reemergence of American female crime writers from the '40s to the '60s may be approaching what occurred with the male counterparts of these writers in the '80s, when Black Lizard and other presses began reissuing the out-of print work of Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Cornell Woolrich, and others. One imprimatur of literary regard came in 2015, when the Library of America issued a two-volume set of female crime writers from the '40s and '50s in which Hughes shared space with, to name a few, the likes of Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, Margaret Millar, and Dolores Hitchens. In a Lonely Place is misogyny, but Hughes's novel is one is which a serial killer of women is far weaker than the women he kills. As the crime novelist Megan Abbott points out in her Afterword, Dix Steele certainly foreshadows Tom Ripley, the much smoother psychopath who was to take center stage for much of Patricia Highsmith's career. But Hughes's vision of violence also prefigures Hannah Arendt's 1970 On Violence. Faced with civil unrest and the often worse police response, Vietnam, and the calls for revolutionary violence among the radical faction of the New Left, Arendt set out to distinguish violence from the concepts of strength and force and power. With would-be revolutionaries fond of quoting Mao's dictum that all political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, Arendt wrote, "Out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of [violence] is power."
She had just passed over the mid hump, she was on the final stretch of down grade. Walking fast. But as he reached that section, a car turned at the corner below, throwing its blatant light up on her, on him. Again anger plucked at his face, his pace slowed . . . The girl was safe. He could feel the relaxation in her footsteps. Anger beat him like a drum. Hughes's imagery amplifies the meaning of the moment: Dix is thrust literally into the light, cast from the safety of the hunt. It's a slap in the face that Hughes follows this potential victim's escape with Dix committing a successful murder, presented by chance, a few hours later, as he is on his way home from spending the evening with friends.She stood in his way and looked him over slowly, from crown to toe. The way a man looked over a woman, not the reverse . . . He stood like a dolt, gawking at her. And that's the core of the relationship. Laurel falls into bed with Dix, but she can't bring herself to fall in love with him. Her instinct prevents her, and a far more conscious part of her knows that Dix can never give her what she dreams of. To Hughes's immense credit, she presents that recognition not as avarice but simply as the knowledge of someone who's seen the horrible stresses money brings into love affairs and marriages and is determined to avoid them.The Best Years of Our Lives, which came out one year before this novel, showed, it's not just crazy men who came back to a feeling of being lost, lost amid the postwar prosperity of America, back to a life whose goals and aims seem so paltry next to the wartime missions they have returned from. A mere two years after this country's greatest triumph, Hughes, like Wyler, foresaw American loneliness as an internal exile. The horror of Dix Steele is just how much he is alienated from -- and how close that alienation comes to what we still call masculinity.Charles Taylor has written for numerous publications, including Salon, The Boston Phoenix, and The New York Times Book Review. Reviewer: Charles Taylor
The Barnes & Noble Review
"It’s something of an axiom that good novels make bad movies. But one of my favorite exceptions is In a Lonely Place ....the novel is more groundbreaking than the film and that Hughes, who died in 1993, belongs in the crime-writing pantheon with male icons like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler….In a Lonely Place is a gripping story, but Hughes was too talented, ambitious, and grounded to play it merely for suspense….as Megan Abbott points out in her splendidly perceptive afterword, Hughes takes the gender clichés of noir and turns them on their head." —John Powers, NPR In a Lonely Place blasted my mind open to new ways of reading.” —Sarah Weinman, Los Angeles Review of Books The Atlantic The Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years The New Yorker ’s Page-Turner BlogThe New York Times Book Review In a Lonely Place is her crown.”—Laurie R. King, author of the Mary Russell novelsIn a Lonely Place , then prepare to lose some sleep. This spine-tingling classics rings chillingly true." —Jan Burke, author of the Irene Kelly seriesThree-Day Town In the Still of the Night Hardboiled Hollywood: The Origins of Great Crime Films Dare Me and The Fever The White Gallows In a Lonely Place ] is a refusal to turn [characters] into classic femme fatales. . . Exhilarating.” —Backlisted Podcast
