In a Lonely Place

by Dorothy B. Hughes, Megan Abbott

Overview

A classic California noir with a feminist twist, this prescient 1947 novel exposed misogyny in post-World War II American society, making it far ahead of its time.

Los Angeles in the late 1940s is a city of promise and prosperity, but not for former fighter pilot Dix Steele.  To his mind nothing has come close to matching “that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the sky.” He prowls the foggy city night—­bus stops and stretches of darkened beaches and movie houses just emptying out—seeking solitary young women. His funds are running out and his frustrations are growing. Where is the good life he was promised? Why does he always get a raw deal? Then he hooks up with his old Air Corps buddy Brub, now working for the LAPD, who just happens to be on the trail of the strangler who’s been terrorizing the women of the city for months...

Written with controlled elegance, Dorothy B. Hughes’s tense novel is at once an early indictment of a truly toxic masculinity and a twisty page-turner with a surprisingly feminist resolution. A classic of golden age noir, In a Lonely Place also inspired Nicholas Ray’s 1950 film of the same name, starring Humphrey Bogart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681371481
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	08/15/2017
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	NOOK Book
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	297,053
File size:	614 KB

About the Author

Dorothy B. Hughes (1904–1993) was born Dorothy Belle Flanagan in Kansas City, Missouri. She received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and worked as a reporter before attending graduate school at the University of New Mexico and Columbia University. In 1931 her collection of poetry, Dark Certainty, was selected for inclusion in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. She was married in 1932 and would not publish her next book, the hard-boiled novel The So Blue Marble, until 1940. Between 1940 and 1952 Hughes published twelve more novels, including The Cross-Eyed Bear and Ride the Pink Horse. For four decades she was the crime-fiction reviewer for The Albuquerque Tribune, earning an Edgar Award for Outstanding Mystery Criticism from the Mystery Writers of America in 1951. The Expendable Man, published in 1963, was her last novel. “I simply hadn’t the tranquility required to write” and care for a family, she later said. In 1978, however, she published The Case of the Real Perry Mason, a critical biography of Erle Stanley Gardner, and that same year she was recognized as a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.

Megan Abbott is the author of eight novels, including The Fever, You Will Know Me, and the Edgar Award–winning Queenpin. She is also the author of The Street Was Mine, a study of hard-boiled fiction and film noir and the editor of A Hell of a Woman, a female crime fiction anthology. She received a Ph.D. in literature from New York University.

Editorial Reviews

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.

There will always be those whose reaction to women crime writers is to think they are delivering a compliment when they say that women can write just as tough as men. But that view reduces the work at hand -- whether written by men or women -- to little more than braggadocio. The unifying point of the best pulp writers was to drag the reader into squirrelly states of anxiety, guilt, complicity, and, over the typically brief lengths of these novels (usually no more than 200 pages), deliver the supremely uncomfortable experience of walking around in the bodies of the protagonists.

Those states are the "lonely place" Hughes refers to in her title, the moods of resentment, longing, paranoia, jealousy, and rage that her protagonist, the serial strangler Dix Steele, exists in. The implicit topic of 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."

Making a similar distinction between strength and violence, Hughes gives us a portrait of a murderer who, though calculating, commits his crimes in a febrile state, one so fragile and agitated the merest thing can break it. In the opening pages, Dix is stalking a potential victim he sees walking home alone at night (the M.O. for all his killings), and he's enjoying the pursuit: "He didn't walk faster, he continued to saunter but he lengthened his stride, smiling slightly. She was afraid."

But like a coughing fit ruining a movie take, a sudden interruption shatters Dix's fantasy of control:

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.

The friends are Brub Nicolai and his wife, Sylvia. Brub and Dix were stationed together in England during the war. What Dix doesn't know about Brub when he looks up his old friend is that Brub is now an LAPD detective investigating the stranglings that are plaguing the city. There's an off-kilter comedy in the scenes where Dix socializes with the Nicolais (almost always at Brub's instigation). Dix is living off a monthly check from a stingy uncle back east. He's convinced the old man he's in L.A. to try his hand at writing a novel. That's the line he uses with Brub and Sylvia, claiming it's a mystery novel, thus giving him license to inquire about Brub's methods and gain an inside line on how the hunt to uncover him is going. But the uneasy interactions between Dix and Sylvia, his seeing her as a rival for Brub's attention and his (correct) hunch that she senses his sickness, are an echo of the relationship at the center of the novel: Dix's affair with the aspiring actress Laurel Grey.

Nicholas Ray's 1950 film of the novel, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, Ray's wife at the time, replaced the novel's plot with what was essentially Ray's meditation on his failing marriage. By contrast, Hughes's novel (though written from Dix's point of view) is very much a woman's take on masculinity and its limits. A male writer might very well have presented Laurel as a sexpot, if not a femme fatale, her assured manner and ability to verbally parry the men after her used as the mark of a hard little number. Hughes presents Laurel's toughness as a necessary defense mechanism. Laurel is wised up but not unfeeling. Dix literally bumps into her at the L.A. apartment complex where they both live, and this is how Hughes describes her:

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.

There is also, in Hughes's line "He stood like a dolt, gawking at her" an awful shadow of the self-loathing that drives Dix. For Dix the ecstasy of falling in love with a woman like Laurel is the pathway to torment, an invitation to indulge his insecurities. The most reasonable and psychologically astute explanation for male violence against women is male feelings of inferiority, and yet in depiction after depiction, novelists and filmmakers often ignore the distinction between violence and power, the distinction Arendt insisted on. It doesn't take long for Dix to go from feeling he's found the girl of his dreams to wondering who she's with if she comes home later than expected, to fretting about how he will afford to entertain her and clothe her, thinking of Laurel as an exquisite possession that must be displayed in an appropriately elegant setting. What Hughes is describing in these moments is common enough male possessiveness. What's startling is that she's placed it in the mind of a psychopath. This isn't soapbox sociology, in the manner of Susan Brownmiller's famous declaration that all men are potential rapists. It's a psychologically acute perception of the continuum on which jealousy and feelings of emasculation and violence reside. Hughes puts the reader inside a dual consciousness, making us feel simultaneously women's physical vulnerability and men's worry that, in the eyes of women, they will never be man enough.

The kicker -- and it's a stunning one -- is that Dix isn't wrong. That appraising look Laurel gives him when she first sees him, the distance and suspicion he senses in Sylvia, are not paranoia on his part. They know something is off with him, intuitively grasping what all his artifice attempts to conceal. And there's an even larger and more unsettling context. The lonely place of the title is not just Dix's state of mind, not just the friend's apartment he has obtained Tom Ripley−style and uses as a hidey-hole. The lonely place is America itself. In the opening paragraph, Dix stands on the shore of the Pacific at night, imagining he is once again flying one of the fighter planes he piloted in the war. "It wasn't often," Hughes writes, "he could capture any of that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the sky. There was a touch of it here, looking down at the ocean rolling endlessly in from the horizon; here high above the beach road with its crawling traffic, its dotting of lights."

When he turns his back on the ocean, looks back at the land he returned to, Dix is just another man who, a short time ago, had a purpose and the respect that came with it. (Hughes offers a contrast here in Brub, who has turned his back on family riches to work and build a life. But he seems a happily adjusted exception.) As in William Wyler's film 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 

“Crime was never Hughes’s interest, evil was, and to be evil, for her, is to be intolerant of others...With her poetic powers of description, she makes that evil a sickness in the mind and a landscape to be surveyed.” —Christine Smallwood, The New Yorker’s Page-Turner Blog

“A tour de force laying open the mind and motives of a killer with extraordinary empathy. The structure is flawless, and the scenes of postwar LA have an immediacy that puts Chandler to shame. No wonder Hughes is the master we keep turning to.”
—Sara Paretsky

“If you wake up in the middle of the night screaming with terror, don’t say we didn’t warn you.” —The New York Times Book Review

"Bringing ...[Dorothy B. Hughes] back is no act of nostalgia. It is a gateway through which we might access her particular view of that road between our glittering versions of American life and the darker reality that waits at the end of the ride." —Walter Mosley
 
“This lady is the queen of noir, and In a Lonely Place is her crown.”—Laurie R. King, author of the Mary Russell novels
 
“A superb novel by one of crime fiction’s finest writers of psychological suspense. What a pleasure it is to see this tale in print once again!”—Marcia Muller, author of the Sharon McCone novels

"Lock your doors and windows before you start reading Dorothy B. Hughes superbly written In a Lonely Place, then prepare to lose some sleep. This spine-tingling classics rings chillingly true." —Jan Burke, author of the Irene Kelly series

"Dorothy B. Hughes was such a mistress of dark suspense that I always had to read the end of her books first to keep from biting off all my fingernails." —Margaret Maron, author of Three-Day Town

"In my rookie days Dorothy B. Hughes was the writer I most wanted to emulate. To me she had the sense of place and the narrative drive of Eric Ambler-tautened by a woman's edginess. To me she still imparts that delightful quiver." —Dorothy Salisbury Davis, author of In the Still of the Night

"Dorothy B. Hughes was in a class of her own. To be a female writer of hard-boiled fiction back in the 1940s was unusual enough, but to write a first-person narrative form the viewpoint of a male serial killer was breaking new ground by anybody's standards." —Max Déecharné author of Hardboiled Hollywood: The Origins of Great Crime Films

"In Hughes's novel, however, there is not a drop of romanticism, not a touch of fantasy. It is a dark, cold gem of a book, a gem without a flicker of heat or light. One that cuts to the touch." —Megan Abbott, author of Dare Me and The Fever

"Hughes was a wonderful writer. There is nothing overdone with her dialog and descriptions. Dix moving through the night, stalking his victims, is suspenseful and chilling but written quietly and creating an atmosphere that makes the reader feel the night and fog about them as they read." —Mack Captures Crime blog

"Dorothy B. Hughes writes literary hardboiled noir taking on and matching Chandler, Hammett, Cain and Thompson at their game." —Rob Kitchlin, author of The White Gallows

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