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.
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