In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life.
In the following passage, she examines Dorothy B. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place and the cultural perception of a link between returned veterans and criminal behavior.
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Upside-Down Cases
Among the most disturbing “upside-down” cases of postwar noir is Dixon Steele, the serial-killer protagonist of Dorothy B. Hughes’s novel In a Lonely Place, published in 1947 and adapted, with considerable alterations, into a 1950 movie starring Humphrey Bogart as a Hollywood screenwriter and Gloria Grahame as his lover, who can’t quite rid herself of the suspicion that he’s a murderer. In the film, Steele is wrongly suspected of killing a cloakroom attendant who works at the restaurant he frequents, but he is under suspicion because of his manifest propensity for violence. We discover that he was a good officer in the Air Corps, but his agent explains that he “hasn’t had a hit since the war” because of an inability to concentrate on his work. When the police review his arrest record, they uncover a history of violence dating from 1946. The film thus implies that while Dix’s volatility may have predated the war—his agent describes it as elemental to his personality— his service has somehow intensified it and prevented him from resuming the heights of his prewar career. (Critics have also argued that the film is an allegory of the Hollywood blacklist.)
In Hughes’s novel, by contrast, Steele’s guilt is unequivocal, and Hughes takes us deep into the mind of a serial killer whose first murder took place in England during the war. Unlike that of the celebrated, if troubled, screenwriter of the film, in the novel Steele’s career as a writer is itself a fiction, which he invents to conceal his true vocation as a prolific serial killer: “Like ninety-three and one-half per cent of the ex-armed forces, I’m writing a book,” he tells the wife of his war buddy, Brub, a detective who happens to be assigned to the case of the serial killer. Unlike the other aspiring veteran-writers, Steele announces that he is writing not a war memoir but a novel. Steele’s life has been soured by resentment and laziness. He lives on the fringes of successful society, with a stingy rich uncle who allows him just enough money to go to Princeton. Once there, he sponges off his well-to-do classmates. After the war, with no interest in getting a job, he figures out a way to survive by killing a college friend and taking over his apartment, his clothes, his liquor, and his car. (There are parallels here to Patricia Highsmith’s later and better-known Ripley novels.)
The war intensifies Steele’s preexisting pathologies and unleashes his violence, but his rage originates—and has always been intimately bound up with—issues of wealth and social class. As the novel’s title intimates, Dix Steele is a creature of the night, a solitary stalker in “a lonely place” who hates and preys on women in the dangerous urban landscape. Killing them gives him the only satisfaction he can get from postwar life. The novel opens with the restless Steele roaming the streets of Los Angeles, searching for the same thrill he once got from flying night missions: “He’d missed it after the war had crashed to a finish and dribbled to an end.” There had been a “wildness” about dangerous missions that he is able to recapture only by killing women. The army brought Dix “the first happy years he’d ever known,” not only because of the visceral excitement of flying but also because of the new socioeconomic status it conferred.
For the first time, Steele was well paid and didn’t have to defer to the rich; he reveled in the particular prestige of pilots, his newly acquired “class,” and the attentions of women. He rose to the rank of colonel and ended the war with a “cushy job” as adjutant to a general in England. So transformative was his status within military hierarchy that Dix was persuaded of its enduring reality even after the war ended. Only when he finds himself trapped in his uncle’s house once again after his discharge does he realize that he has confused “interlude for life span.” But the wholesale destruction of war—especially the air war of the pilot—teaches Steele how easy it is to kill and to get away with killing. He discovers that no one much cares about a single life amid so much death. The electric arousal of killing in war has no analogue in civilian life. Although he momentarily envies the normalcy and “happiness” he perceives in the homelife of Brub and his wife, Sylvia, he almost immediately rejects the mere “quicksilver” of such postwar contentment in favor of the “excitement and power and the hot stir of lust” he derives from stalking and murdering women.
At what amounts to a reunion dinner at the detective’s house, the two men explore their motivations for joining up. Brub jokes that he fought the war to get home to Sylvia. When she in turn asks Steele why he fought, he decides to impress her with the following reply: “I’ve wondered about it frequently, Sylvia. Why did I or anyone else fight the war? Because we had to isn’t good enough. I didn’t have to when I enlisted. I think it was because it was the thing to do. And the Air Corps was the thing to do. All of us in college were nuts about flying. I was a sophomore at Princeton when things were starting. I didn’t want to be left out of any excitement.” Brub counters with some retrospective bombast of his own: “It was the thing to do or that was the rationalization. We’re a casual generation, Dix, we don’t want anyone to know we bleed if we’re pricked. But self-defense is one of the few prime instincts left. Despite the cover-up, it was self-defense. And we knew it.” Brub’s explanation combines primal instincts and stoic masculinity, with perhaps a hint of duty or patriotism, but it is Steele’s explanation that makes war seem less a cause than a fashion. The glamorous Air Corps becomes the social outsider’s American Dream come true. The tragedy for Steele is not the war, but the fact that it had to end.
“I Steal”
Steele may be one of the most extreme incarnations of the alienated veteran in postwar fiction—his name itself an evocation of treachery and force—but his irascibility, emotional isolation, and inability to reacclimate to peacetime is consistent with the portraits of veterans found throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, not only in the cultural “underground,” to borrow Manny Farber’s term, but also in the mainstream. Scores of films throughout the period address—in ways direct or oblique, in the main or in passing—the challenges of veteran readjustment and examine the fate of veterans at the margins of American society. They include dramas that explore the physical and psychological wounds of war: Pride of the Marines (1945), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Till the End of Time (1946), Homecoming (1948), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956). They also include comedies that address readjustment in a different register: Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), The Hucksters (1947), Good Sam (1948). In the last of these, the title character’s listless brother-in-law is one of the more than eight million veterans who took a year’s “readjustment allowance” from the government. The allowance was made available to veterans who were unemployed or earned under a certain threshold. As the historian Joseph C. Goulden notes in The Best Years: 1945–1950, those who took it were regarded as loafers by civilians and fellow veterans alike. Finally, there were films that used the war and its veterans as an occasion to direct attention to various social injustices: Bright Victory (1951) and Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) dramatize racism against Black and Japanese American GIs respectively, while Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and Crossfire both treat the issue of anti-Semitism. The latter film substituted this issue for the anti-gay violence depicted in the original novel, Richard Brooks’s The Brick Foxhole (1945).
Noir, in other words, offers only the most stylized, surreal reflection of the experience of war and its constantly recrudescing memories, memories that erupted across genres and registers, from highbrow to low: from Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead to the pulps, from the largely neglected tradition of American war poetry to the movies. In a review of Poets of World War II, an anthology edited by the veteran and poet Harvey Shapiro, the critic Helen Vendler describes this body of work as ranging from “lyric sweetness” to “selfexempting satire.” If, as Vendler suggests, the tradition registers “a relative absence of guilt,” it also evinces a lack of naïve enthusiasm or ideological commitment. This poetry tends to simmer with an anger more often directed at American institutions than at the enemy. Its speakers are often cast, Vendler notes, as the victims of the state that conscripted them rather than as the perpetrators of shocking violence.
It is the home-front crime story, however, that most urgently takes up the issue of an American violence come home to roost. Through the vehicle of the crime story—blackmail, heist, even murder—these works highlight the deep ambivalence, forgotten over time, that once characterized attitudes to the war itself and those who fought it. A rise in crime—fueled by veteran and nonveteran perpetrators, of course—followed the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. The rate of incarceration among Vietnam veterans is especially high. In 1978, at a time when nineteen percent of Americans had military service, twenty-four percent of inmates in state facilities were veterans. That percentage began to drop in 1998, and veterans are today no more likely than the nonveteran population to find themselves in jail or prison. A 2011–12 Department of Justice study revealed that of the country’s incarcerated, eight percent, or 181,500, were veterans.
Historically, there has been a tendency to mistake a correlation between military service and incarceration for causation; crime among veterans is linked directly to military service while other aspects of a criminal’s history are neglected. After World War II, a study of eleven prisons in the upper Mississippi Valley concluded that from 1947 to 1949 a little more than a third of those incarcerated were veterans of World War I or II. After extensive research, including interviews with prisoners and wardens, the study’s author, Walter A. Lunden, who published his findings in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology in 1952, concluded, “It cannot be said with any degree of certainty that military experience causes service men to commit crimes after they return to civilian life.” In perhaps ten percent of cases, he continued, “military experience may have had some connection with later civilian crimes.”
Nevertheless, as Richard Lingeman notes in The Noir Forties, the “violent crime film” was also “the most commercially successful kind of veterans’ stories.” Audiences were primed to accept a connection between military service and crime. War service also tends to feature in the lives of the police and detectives as well as the criminals in these stories. In addition to Macdonald’s Lew Archer, Chester Himes’s Harlem police detectives “Grave Digger” Jones and “Coffin Ed” Johnson (and, a much later incarnation beginning in the 1990s, Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins) have military experience that has shaped their worldviews and armed them with particular insights into violence and human nature. Whether private detectives who have been kicked off the police force or renegades working uneasily within departments for bosses who do not appreciate their idiosyncratic methods, the outlaw status of these detectives mirrors that of the criminals they pursue.
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Excerpted from Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness, by Elizabeth D. Samet. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright 2022, Elizabeth D. Samet. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
