PRIMER: Dorothy B. Hughes
Dorothy B Hughes is most often remembered as the author of In a Lonely Place, the 1947 novel later adapted into
the classic film noir starring Humphrey Bogart. In more recent years, thanks to the reprinting of both this novel and her final novel The Expendables, people have begun to consider her work more seriously, recognizing Hughes’ important role as one of the earliest female crime authors.
But Hughes wrote much more than just these two books—twelve more, in fact. She won a Grand Master award from the MWA and an Edgar for Best Mystery Criticism. Aside from In A Lonely Place, two of her novels (Ride The Pink Horse, The Fallen Sparrow) were made into films.
The downside of being a prolific author is that, inevitably, much of one’s work is ignored in favor of one or two particularly enduring titles, which for whatever reason persist in popular culture as the others fade into the background. But an author’s “minor” works are often just as rewarding as their more successful titles. Nowhere is this truer than in Hughes’ case.
Hughes was, on a line level, an extremely talented stylist. When one considers the power of her terse, spare prose, which competes with Chandler or Hammett in its concise clarity, it comes as no surprise to learn that her first published book was a volume of poetry. But where Hughes truly shines as an author is in the psychological complexity of her books. Most often written from a third-person omniscient perspective, Hughes’ books allow the mental and emotional states of her characters to shift the world around them, heightening the intensity of terror and suspense.
Take, for example, Hughes’ first novel, 1940’s The So Blue Marble. Two dashing twins approach Griselda on the street, smiling and laughing as they greet her, walk her home, and follow her up to her ex-husband Con’s apartment. Though they treat her like an old friend, Griselda has never seen either of them before in her life. Her anxiety intensifies when she learns the purpose for their visit: to recover a lustrous blue marble hidden somewhere in the house.
They leave without the marble, but when they return the next day, the plotline becomes as ominous as it is bizarre: bodies pile up, and we eventually come to understand the astounding power of the marble the two men seek. Meanwhile, as Griselda's fear escalates, the plot spirals into a nightmarish frenzy. The result is a unique novel that might be best categorized as “fantastic noir,” a strange but altogether exciting read.
After this genre-bending work, Hughes turned to more traditional hardboiled fiction with The Cross-Eyed Bear Murders, published later that same year. In it, a young woman moves from Vermont to New York to hunt down her husband’s killers, and after she takes a job that coincidentally has her working with her late husband’s brother, she realizes that he stood to claim a large inheritance, one vast enough to justify not only his murder, but her own.
Seven years later, Hughes’ Dread Journey showed the full maturation of her work with suspense. In a cross-country train trip from Los Angeles to Chicago, a movie star begins to fear that her director and travel companion may be trying to kill her. The novel, which Sarah Weinman praised as Hughes’ best, is both a wildly suspenseful read and a provocative commentary on Hollywood society.
These books exemplify Hughes’ greatest strengths as a writer: she pulls the reader swiftly along, even while the plotline constantly shifts. Characters constantly change sides, and both the reader and the protagonist must struggle to know who to trust. Throughout, Hughes uses her striking third-person narration to suffuse her complex plotting with equal amounts of doubt and dread, intensifying the suspense of her scenarios.
Though she lived until 1993, Hughes penned her last work of fiction thirty years earlier. She continued to write mystery criticism until late in life, and authored a biography of Erle Stanley Gardner. While her most productive period proved shorter than her fans hoped it would, it was loaded with novels of a high calibre. The majority of her work is available in eBook formats from MysteriousPress.com.
FURTHER READING
Ed Gorman on The So Blue Marble
Sarah Weinman, "On the World's Finest Female Noir Writer"
Dorothy B Hughes page on Domestic Suspense
Movie trailers for The Fallen Sparrow and Ride the Pink Horse
