In a Lonely Place (1947)

Before I ever got to the Library of America series (Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s ... and then four more from the 1950s), I did not know much about Dorothy B. Hughes’s reputation. I picked In a Lonely Place out of a list of recommended short mystery novels on the CrimeReads website. I thought I’d check it out, along with some others such as Georges Simenon’s Tropic Moon, as long as they were being recommended (and short!). In a Lonely Place is far more daring than the Humphrey Bogart movie of the same name based on it and, when you break down the feminist themes (as Megan Abbott does in an afterword), it’s pretty remarkable, anticipating Patricia Highsmith’s whole Ripley series among other things. Jim Thompson might have liked making a main character a narcissistic psychopath. Hughes keeps all her violence offstage, which is one way to do it, maybe better than Thompson’s full-frontal assaults. Dix Steele (Dix Steele!!), our (anti)hero, is closer to Ripley, a smooth-taking con man, however brutal under the surface. But Steele is also a brutal psychopath, and—chillingly—it seems to be all misogyny. There’s a lot of really sharp inversion here, such as a woman who appears at first to be standard-issue femme fatale, playing it cool, until the moment you suddenly realize she’s onto this guy and scared out of her wits. The novel is also really good on Los Angeles, reminding us again it’s the only city for noir. New York and London don’t have the sunshine to make the distinctions so plain between light and shadow, or something. Hughes makes the urban sprawl itself and the geography as sinister as they need to be. In a Lonely Place helped me see how good Dennis Etchison is on that city too. I struggled some with the language—for all its clarity it felt labored in patches. But I have the same problem with Dashiell Hammett so no doubt it is me. Certainly it qualifies as well-written. I have some interest in seeing what else Hughes has done—Ride the Pale Horse seems to be a favorite, though I didn’t get much from that movie version. If anything, In a Lonely Place is prompting me to look into Highsmith’s Ripley novels further. I don’t like the misogyny in Lonely Place, but I think that’s the intent. The novel is often simply about the fear of men that women can have to live with constantly. Hughes is quite thorough about justifying that here.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)