“Dorothy B. Hughes (1904–1993)—the B stands for Belle, and Hughes replaced her maiden name, Flanagan, when she married Lewis Hughes in 1932—is my favorite crime writer. Full stop.” I wrote these sentences in 2012, for an essay published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, and now, nearing the end of 2019, I have not altered my opinion in the slightest.
The steadfastness of that opinion owes largely to my love of Hughes’ 1947 novel In a Lonely Place, which I’ve reread every year since 2004. That first read remains an indelible memory, because it coincided with my gradual leap from passionate crime fiction fan to professional writer. (The good thing about earning a living as a writer, however, is that it doesn’t detract from being a fan of the best stuff.)
Hughes’ post-World War II novel, which had then been reissued by The Feminist Press and more recently republished by NYRB Classics, blasted my tender young mind open to new ways of reading. I marveled at Hughes’s ability to let readers in on what was really happening under the nose of her thoroughly unreliable narrator, Dix Steele, while he remained in the dark about his own nefarious motivations and about the women who would see to his undoing and seal his fate. Hughes, more than seven decades ago, depicted the psyche and actions of a serial killer with such psychological accuracy that FBI profilers would learn a few things from immersing themselves in her prose.
In the decade and a half since my first encounter with In a Lonely Place (also the source material for the fine, but very different, film starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame) I’ve made my way through the entirety of Hughes’s crime fiction oeuvre, including that formidable stretch of eleven novels published between her first, The So Blue Marble (1940), reissued last year by Penzler Publishers, and In a Lonely Place.
Hughes was that rare bird who couldn’t write a turkey.Hughes was that rare bird who couldn’t write a turkey. She built worlds—especially in the early New York novels and the later ones set around Los Angeles’ twisting streets and in New Mexico’s wide-open spaces—that were vivid with bright colors, glittering baubles, and big dreams, yet never felt cartoonish. Her main characters stood outside ruling classes and governments, took part in clandestine operations trying to unseat evil, and overcame damaged pasts and terror-filled presents with resilience and toughness that surprised even them. Hughes, in other words, plumbed three-dimensional depths, no matter the plot device or twist.
Ride The Pink Horse (1946) and The Expendable Man (1963) are often cited as Hughes’ other masterpieces, and I concur. The most welcome surprise for me, though, was Dread Journey, published two years prior to Lonely Place; the novel hardly merited much critical coverage in 1945, and largely fell off the crime fiction map—until now.
Dread Journey, as told by a different writer, would be a more conventional locked-room mystery: a cast of characters in various states of psychological distress all sharing space on the same Pullman luxury train traveling across the country. Someone dies, and the death, initially written off as a drug overdose, is later realized as a murder, with a handful of likely suspects who carried—or were perceived to carry—a grudge. There might even be a detective already on the train, or about to hop on, to solve the mystery. That detective might be Hercule Poirot, and this novel might be Murder on the Orient Express.
Dorothy B. Hughes, however, wasn’t writing a locked-room mystery, but a suspense novel steeply suffused with the dread of the novel’s title. The premise, more than a little prosaic, traps all of the novel’s characters on a cross-country train from Los Angeles to New York and inevitably destines one of them for death far short of the train’s final destination. But we don’t know when and we don’t know who, not at the outset. What is more important, to her and then to the reader, are the studies she makes of her characters, almost all of whom have some tie to Hollywood, and almost all of whom begin as tropes, but deepen into far more interesting figures.
These characters include the big star about to fall (Kitten Agnew), the producer/director yearning to destroy her (Vivien Spender) and the producer’s loyal, long-suffering assistant (Mike Dana), the star’s malleable, about-to-ripen replacement (Gratia Shawn), a playboy bandleader on the periphery (Leslie Augustin), and the desperate, failed screenwriter skulking back home to mama (Sidney Pringle). Removed from Hollywood are two other men: the porter, James Cobbett, who sees everything but is left alone and underestimated because of class (service) and race (black), and Hank Cavanaugh, the once-hotshot reporter who has descended into alcoholism after seeing too much at the front. Uniting almost all of the cast members, in direct and indirect ways, is a dream, as personified by the role of Clavdia Chaucat, a Cleopatra-like literary figure rich in complexity.
For Kitten, Clavdia personifies her burgeoning ambition as a serious actress to transcend Spender’s clutches. For Viv, the part of Clavdia is his ultimate chance to turn fantasy into reality, the part dangled to woman after woman who did not meet his Galatea-like ideal; when they fail, he sets out to destroy them. For Gratia, it’s an opportunity, the enormity of the stakes remaining just out of reach. And for the other men in their orbit—Les, Hank, and Sidney—Clavdia is a conduit for their own thwarted dreams, disappointments, and redemption quests.
Gratia in particular is a classic Hughes character, one presented through the lens of others—especially men, another classic Hughes gambit—while the reader suspects something else is going on underneath the surface. Kitten senses this depth, even voices it at times, but the most astute comment emerges from Hank: “Gratia could look out for herself; however unworldly she appeared, that very quality was her protection. It was Kitten with all her brazen world wisdom who was helpless.”
Viv Spender may be Hughes’ most overt villain, even more so than the psychopathic twins who charm and scheme and manipulate their way through The So Blue Marble. Spender is a man with an indomitable God complex, ready to crush anyone in his way (“He’s as sane as you or I,” Les Augustin tells Gratia Shawn late in Dread Journey, “With one small exception. He thinks he’s Almighty God”). But even overt villains have understandable motivations. “One thing that money and power and importance did to a man. It made him lone,” Cobbett notices with particular clarity. But Spender’s unhealthy obsessions are best understood through his secretary who has witnessed her boss at his worst, and still remained with him.
Mike, like Kitten and like Gratia, is a product of internalized misogyny. She knows all of Spender’s dark secrets but remains with him out of loyalty and out of some deeper connection she can only admit to herself, even as it’s patently obvious to others (one suspects that James Cobbett, the all-observing, all-analyzing porter, sussed this out immediately, even as he wouldn’t venture to express this opinion to anyone else). So it’s especially satisfying that Mike gets the crime fiction equivalent of an eleven o’clock number, where the depths of her feelings, her own sublimated rage and desire for justice, are all aired—it’s a star turn that is well worth the wait, and earns its catharsis.
Hughes’ choice of omniscient viewpoint invites the reader into the characters’ inner sancta and excavates their fears, their desires, their jealousies, their dreams with the most exacting literary scalpel.Hughes’ choice of omniscient viewpoint invites the reader into the characters’ inner sancta and excavates their fears, their desires, their jealousies, their dreams with the most exacting literary scalpel. There is triumph, but the aftertaste was never more bitter and pungent.
Every sentence of Dread Journey carries the weight of the tragic events that will unfold over the course of the novel. But Hughes has also written a sly portrait of how Hollywood worked then and, as the #MeToo movement that erupted in earnest in the fall of 2017 showed, still works now: insecure, powerful men lusting for greater power, innocents thrust into situations beyond their control, and terrible contracts besting everybody.
Dread Journey was published a year after Dorothy B. Hughes moved to Los Angeles. She had published seven novels and one, The Fallen Sparrow, had already been adapted into a 1943 film starring John Garfield and directed by Richard Wallace. (Films of Ride The Pink Horse and In A Lonely Place followed in 1947 and 1950, respectively.) This was boom time for suspense stories, and women writers like Hughes, Vera Caspary, Marty Holland, and Gertrude Walker found ample work writing scripts, adaptations of their own novels or original treatments.
But Dread Journey never made it to the screen. I wonder why, but I also do not. The observations about Hollywood are too pointed, even for an industry already pretending to be interested in self-reflection (A Star Is Born, the original version, was less than a decade in the past). Women may have been paid, even well, but never on par with their male counterparts. Hughes had a family to support. Less than a decade later, she would put family over work, going on a novel-writing hiatus between The Davidian Report (1952) and The Expendable Man (1963). And after that latter novel, there would be none more.
Interviews with Hughes often asked after favorites of her own novels. She made, to my mind, curious judgments, mostly by not mentioning In a Lonely Place. Was it, and Dread Journey, mere hackwork to Hughes? She never said, and we’ll never know. The work can transcend the writer, and Dorothy B. Hughes had so much talent, and so much precision, that masterpieces emerged out of the constraints of genre.
Dread Journey is a prime example of this transcendence. The novel, with this choice reissue, should take its rightful place among the upper echelon of Hughes’ body of work, and of twentieth century crime fiction as a whole.
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