Books by Dorothy B. Hughes
In a Lonely Place (Femmes Fatales)
"Puts Chandler to shame . . . Hughes is the master we keep turning to."Sara Paretsky, author of the V. I. Warshawski novels
"A superb novel by one of crime fiction's finest writers of psychological suspense. . . . What a pleasure it is to see this tale in print once again!"Marcia Miller, author of the Sharon McCone novels
"This lady is the queen of noir, and In a Lonely Place is her crown."Laurie R. King, author of the Mary Russell novels
Postwar Los Angeles is a lonely place where the American Dream is showing its seamy undersideand a stranger is preying on young women. The suggestively names Dix Steele, a cynical vet with a chip on his shoulder about the opposite sex, is the LAPD's top suspect. Dix knows enough to watch his step, especially since his best friend is on the force, but when he meets the luscious Laurel Graya femme fatale with brainssomething begins to crack. The basis for extraordinary performances by Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in the 1950 film version of the book, In a Lonely Place tightens the suspence with taut, hard-boiled prose and stunningly undoes the convential noir plot.
Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era. Enjoy the series: Bedelia; The Blackbirder; Bunny Lake Is Missing; By Cecile; The G-String Murders; The Girls in 3-B; In a Lonely Place; Laura; Mother Finds a Body; Now, Voyager; Skyscraper; Stranger on Lesbos; Women's Barracks.
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Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s (LOA #268): Laura / The Horizontal Man / In a Lonely Place / The Blank Wall (Library of America Women Crime Writers Collection)
by Dorothy B. Hughes, Vera Caspary, Helen Eustis, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
A landmark collection of four brilliant novels by the female pioneers of crime fiction—women who paved the way for Gillian Flynn, Tana French, and Lisa Scottoline
Though women crime and suspense writers dominate today’s bestseller lists, the extraordinary work of their mid-century predecessors is largely unknown. Turning from the mean streets of the hardboiled school, these groundbreaking female novelists found the roots of fear and violence in a quiet suburban neighborhood, on a college campus, or in a comfortable midtown hotel. Their work—influential in its day and still vibrant today—is long overdue for discovery.
Edited by The Real Lolita author Sarah Weinman, this collection gathers four classic crime novels from the 1940s: Vera Caspary’s famous career girl mystery, Laura; Helen Eustis’s intricate academic thriller, The Horizontal Man; Dorothy B. Hughes’s terrifyingly intimate portrait of a serial killer, In a Lonely Place; and Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall, in which a wartime wife is forced to take extreme measures when her family is threatened. Together, these underappreciated works reveal the vital and unacknowledged lineage of today’s leading crime writers.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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Crime Novels: Five Classic Thrillers 1961-1964 (LOA #370): The Murderers / The Name of the Game Is Death / Dead Calm / The Expendable Man / The Score (Library of America, 370)
by Richard Stark, Dorothy B. Hughes, Fredric Brown, Dan J. Marlowe
In the 1960s the masters of crime fiction expanded the genre’s literary and psychological possibilities with audacious new themes, forms, and subject matter—here are five of their finest works
This is the first of two volumes gathering the best American crime fiction of the 1960s, nine novels of astonishing variety and inventiveness that pulse with the energies of that turbulent, transformative decade.
In The Murderers (1961) by Fredric Brown, an out-of-work actor, hanging out with Beat drifters on the fringes of Hollywood, concocts a murder scheme that devolves into nightmare. This late work by a master in many genres is one of his darkest and most ingenious.
Dan J. Marlowe’s The Name of the Game Is Death(1962) channels the inner life of a violent criminal who freely acknowledges the truth of a prison psychiatrist’s diagnosis: “Your values are not civilized values.” Written with unnerving emotional authenticity, the story hurtles toward an annihilating climax.
Charles Williams drew on his experience in the merchant marine for his thriller Dead Calm (1963). A newlywed couple alone on a small yacht find themselves at the mercy of the mysterious survivor they have rescued from a sinking ship, in a suspenseful story that chillingly evokes the perils of the open ocean.
In the beautifully told and sharply observant The Expendable Man (1963), Dorothy B. Hughes’s final masterpiece of suspense, a young man in the American Southwest runs afoul of racial assumptions after he picks up a hitchhiker who soon turns up dead.
In twenty-four brilliantly constructed novels, Richard Stark (a pen name of Donald Westlake) charted the career of Parker, a hard-nosed professional thief, with rigorous clarity. The Score (1964), a stand-out in the series, finds Parker and his criminal associates hatching a plot to rob simultaneously all the jewelry stores, payroll offices, and banks in a remote Western mining town, only to come up against the human limits of even the most intricate planning.
Volume features include an introduction by editor Geoffrey O'Brien (Hardboiled America), newly researched biographies of the writers and helpful notes, and an essay on textual selection.
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$40.00
The Expendable Man (New York Review Books Classics)
“It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumably educated, civilized man.” And Hugh Denismore, a young doctor driving his mother’s Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix, is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged, would seem to have the world at his feet, even. Then why does the sight of a few redneck teenagers disconcert him? Why is he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the desert highway? And why is he the first person the police suspect when she is found dead in Arizona a few days later?
Dorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With The Expendable Man, first published in 1963, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes.
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The So Blue Marble (An American Mystery Classic)
Three well-heeled villains terrorize New York’s high society in pursuit of a rare and powerful gem
The society pages announce it before she even arrives: Griselda Satterlee, daughter of the princess of Rome, has left her career as an actress behind and is traveling to Manhattan to reinvent herself as a fashion designer. They also announce the return of the dashing Montefierrow twins to New York after a twelve-year sojourn in Europe. But there is more to this story than what’s reported, which becomes clear when the three meet one evening during a walk, and their polite conversation quickly takes a menacing turn. The twins are seeking a rare and powerful gem and they believe it’s stashed in the unused apartment where Griselda is staying. Baffled by the request, she pushes them away, but they won’t take no for an answer. When they return, accompanied by Griselda’s long-estranged younger sister, the murders begin...
Drenched in the glamour and luxury of the New York elite, The So Blue Marble is a perfectly Art Deco suspense novel in which nothing is quite as it seems. While different in style from her later books, Dorothy B. Hughes’s debut highlights her greatest strengths as an author, rendered with both the poetic language and the psychology of fear for which she is known today.
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Dread Journey (An American Mystery Classic)
A movie star fears for her life on a train journey from Los Angeles to New York…
Hollywood big-shot Vivien Spender has waited ages to produce the work that will be his masterpiece: a film adaptation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. He’s spent years grooming young starlets for the lead role, only to discard each one when a newer, fresher face enters his view. Afterwards, these rejected women all immediately fall from grace; excised from the world of pictures, they end up in rehab, or jail, or worse. But Kitten Agnew, the most recent to encounter this impending doom, won’t be gotten rid of so easily―her contract simply doesn’t allow for it. Accompanied by Mr. Spender on a train journey from Los Angeles to Chicago, she begins to fear that the producer might be considering a deadly alternative. Either way, it’s clear that something is going to happen before they reach their destination, and as the train barrels through America’s heartland, the tension accelerates towards an inescapable finale.
Reprinted for the first time in over twenty years, Dread Journey is a taut thriller that exemplifies Dorothy B. Hughes’s greatest strengths as a writer―namely, her sharpened prose and mastery of psychological suspense. While its fine-tuned plot is just as exciting as it was in 1945, when the novel was first published, and its portrayal of Hollywood’s less savory elements remains all-too-relevant today, the book’s characters and setting provide pure Golden Age fare, sure to please any devotee of classic mystery novels.
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The Fallen Sparrow
Loyalty and friendship motivate a quest for revenge in this early noir novel by a master of the genre. For more than a year, Kit McKittrick languished in a Fascist prison in Spain where he was tortured by a limping jailor known only as Wobblefoot. He escaped with the help of a childhood friend from America who came overseas with him to fight for the Republican cause. When the two return to the United States, Kit goes West to heal, both physically and psychologically, while Louie remains in New York for the high society life of cocktails and cafes that he had enjoyed before his dangerous adventure.
But Kit’s convalescence is cut short when he learns that Louie has taken a long dive out of a high window. He’s certain that his friend wouldn’t have made the fatal fall without being pushed and, on a quest for vengeance, sets out for New York to get even with the killer. When he arrives, Kit discovers a host of suspicious characters that Louie left behind but he’ll have to conquer his own past demons before he can achieve his gruesome goal.
A revenge thriller elevated by psychological depth and haunting suspense, The Fallen Sparrow shows noir master Dorothy B. Hughes developing the style for which she is known today. Like her later masterpieces, In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse, this too was adapted for a now-classic film noir by the same title.
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$15.95
In a Lonely Place (New York Review Books)
A classic California noir with a feminist twist, this prescient 1947 novel exposed misogyny in post-World War II American society, making it far ahead of its time.
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.
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