Recommended reading - In a Lonely Place (1947)

In a Lonely Place (1947).

by Dorothy B. Hughes.

 

Published by NYRB Classics.

Paperback.

 

ISBN-10: 1681371472

ISBN-13: 978-1681371474

 

Description:

 “In a Lonely Place blasted my mind open to new ways of reading.” – Sarah Weinman, Los Angeles Review of Books.

Los Angeles in the late 1940s is a city of promise and prosperity, but not for former fighter pilot Dix Steele.  To his mind nothing has come close to matching “that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the sky.” He prowls the foggy city night – bus stops and stretches of darkened beaches and movie houses just emptying out – seeking solitary young women. His funds are running out and his frustrations are growing. Where is the good life he was promised? Why does he always get a raw deal? Then he hooks up with his old Air Corps buddy Brub, now working for the LAPD, who just happens to be on the trail of the strangler who’s been terrorizing the women of the city for months...

Written with controlled elegance, Dorothy B. Hughes’s tense novel is at once an early indictment of a truly toxic masculinity and a twisty page-turner with a surprisingly feminist resolution. A classic of golden age noir, In a Lonely Place also inspired Nicholas Ray’s 1950 film of the same name, starring Humphrey Bogart.

“Crime was never Hughes’s interest, evil was, and to be evil, for her, is to be intolerant of others... With her poetic powers of description, she makes that evil a sickness in the mind and a landscape to be surveyed.” – Christine Smallwood, The New Yorker’s Page-Turner Blog.

“A tour de force laying open the mind and motives of a killer with extraordinary empathy. The structure is flawless, and the scenes of postwar LA have an immediacy that puts Chandler to shame. No wonder Hughes is the master we keep turning to.” – Sara Paretsky.