My mother-in-law heard I was putting pen to paper and crafting a noir thriller. She sent me two Dorothy B. Hughes paperbacks—In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse. I hope they help you on your journey, she said. I thanked her, and right after I hung up, began to read the first novel.
Maybe this would finally get me out of my rut; I was trying to write the end of my novel. Who lives, who dies, does the protagonist leave town, what happens to his friends?
In Ride the Pink Horse, Sailor, a hoodlum from Chicago, arrives in Santa Fe. It’s past midnight. Unable to find a hotel because of the annual Fiesta, he wanders around town looking for somewhere he can park his tired self, maybe have a drink and a bite to eat. Hughes sets the scene: “He could hear raucous noise this far away, the sardonic blare of a jukebox, the muffled roar of men mixing with liquor, the shrill screams of women mixing with men and liquor.”
Sailor doesn’t hesitate and enters the bar. “The pack around the bar was yelling over the juke. The air was fog blue with smoke. Every table jammed, the square of dance floor jammed. Everybody drinking, everybody screaming, the only silence a scowling waiter, scuttling through the narrow space between the tables, a tray on his uplifted paw.”
In a Lonely Place is set in Los Angeles, where the protagonist, Dix Steele, is first seen driving along Sunset, cutting “south at Rodeo, swinging back to Wilshire.” He is a former fighter pilot, he is no longer a hero, and he is struggling to adapt to this new reality. A world where Dix no longer has control. This turns into paranoia and ultimately insanity, which exhibits itself in Dix stalking and strangling young women. On the drive he observes: “It wasn’t pretty for long. A few estates and it became a road of shacks, little places such as men built in the mountains before the rich discovered their privacy and ousted them. And then the shacks were left behind and the road became a curving pass through the canyon to some valley beyond.”
Then Hughes infuses the narrative with Dix’s state of mind. “It would be lonely up here at night; there were deep culverts, heavy brush, on the side of the road. It was lonely up here now and they passed no cars. It was as if they had entered into a forbidden valley. . .”
I was hooked on Dorothy. I needed more.
So I walked through Union Square in the thrall of the Green Market, snaked my way through the clustered shoppers’ bodies, shielded my eyes from the sun breaking sporadically through the leaves of the trees in the park, headed down Broadway, and entered The Strand on the corner of 12th. I walked past the tables stacked with paperbacks and hardcovers all the way to the back of the store, took a left, and found the mystery section.
I perused the shelves and spotted one single Dorothy B. Hughes novel—The Expendable Man—covered in a thin layer of dust. I reached up, grabbed the paperback, and glanced at the front jacket. It had an afterword by Walter Mosley. Of course it would be Mosley, he also writes about tormented protagonists in his noirs. And he also penned two enlightening books: This Year You Write Your Novel, and Elements of Fiction. They helped kickstart my writing journey.
Without reading the back cover I paid for the book and that evening I began to read it.
The story follows Dr. Hugh Densmore, a medical intern from U.C.L.A as he drives from Los Angeles to Phoenix to attend his niece’s wedding. Along the way he reluctantly picks up a hitchhiker—a rude, poorly dressed, and thankless teenage girl. The reader wonders why Hugh feels apprehension while waiting for the girl to hop in his car, discomfort at the thought of teenage joyriders returning to taunt him, impatient at standing still by the side of the road. I interpreted this nervousness as that of a grown man worried that he might be seen with a young girl. The story is set in 1963.
The tension ratchets up. Hugh drops the girl off at a bus station. She shows up at his hotel demanding he give her an abortion. He sends her away. And only when detectives pay him a visit does the reader find out that Dr. Hugh Densmore is a Black man. One third of the way into the story. A momentous slight of hand, worthy of Houdini. Now we understand why Hugh was acting the way he was.
And in 1963 Arizona, although it isn’t the Deep South as Hugh says to himself, a Black man who was seen giving a white teenager a ride—and the same white teenager is found dead in an Arroyo—is guilty until proven innocent.
I finished the novel in one day, mesmerized at Hughes’s ability to propel the story and infuse it with angst throughout, from the dialogue between the Black protagonists, the confrontation with the local (white and racist) detectives, down to the descriptions of the desert, the City of Phoenix, the oppressive heat by day, and the icy air at night.
Whether it’s Santa Fe in the thralls of Fiesta, Los Angeles at night, or the Sonoran Desert heat, Hughes infuses her scenes with tension, dread, and anticipation. She goes deep into the psyche of her characters, conveying their mood, their mental state. Her dialogue and prose capture the claustrophobic locales, the ambiance, the desolation, and the loneliness of the protagonists, building suspense that propels the story from the first page to the last. And as a white woman in post-war America, she had courage: she wrote stories about men, she wrote stories about racism, she wrote stories about the tensions that percolated just below the surface of daily life in America. I was not the first to make this observation, but it’s worth repeating: Hughes doesn’t write thrillers, she writes about the inherent evil in men’s souls.
Mosley concludes his afterword with, “So why has she [Hughes] not been more celebrated? Why hasn’t her work been anthologized like that of so many of her peers?” Good questions, because that’s what I asked myself after reading her novels. I will not answer Mosley’s questions. I will only say that Dorothy B. Hughes deserves her place in the pantheon of brilliant American writers, thriller and non.
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