Born on this day – Dorothy B. Hughes:

Dorothy B. Hughes

Writer

August 10, 1904 – May 6, 1993

Credits:

Books:

Dark Certainty (1931); Dread Journey (1945); Erle Stanley Gardner (1978); Fifty Best Mysteries (1993); In a Lonely Place (1947); Johnnie (1944); Mr. President, Private Eye (2004); Ride the Pink Horse (1946); The Bamboo Blonde (1941); The Blackbirder (1943); The Candy Kid (1950); The Cross Eyed Bear Murders (1940); The Davidian Report (1952); The Delicate Ape (1944); The Expendable Man (1963); The Fallen Sparrow (1942); The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1999); The Scarlet Imperial (1946); The So Blue Marble (1940).

Movies and television:

The Hanged Man (1964); Destry (1964); Bourbon Street Beat (1960); Climax! (1958); Robert Montgomery Presents (1950–1952); In a Lonely Place (1950); Ride the Pink Horse (1947); The Corpse Came C.O.D. (1947); Follow the Boys (1944); The Fallen Sparrow (1943).

Recommended reading - The So Blue Marble, by Dorothy B. Hughes (1940):

The So Blue Marble

By Dorothy B. Hughes.

Introduction by Otto Penzler.

Published by American Mystery Classics.

First published 1940.

ISBN-10: 1613161050

ISBN-13: 9781613161050

Description:

The debut by one of the great American suspense writers will suck you in even as it makes you keep asking, "Did I just read that?" – Kirkus.

Nonstop action, with menace and daring exploits bursting through the smooth veneer of upper-class life.. Readers new to this forgotten classic are in for a treat. – Publishers Weekly.

You will have to read [The So Blue Marble] for yourself, and if you wake up in the night screaming with terror, don’t say we didn’t warn you. – The New York Times Book Review.

Extraordinary . . . [Hughes’s] brilliant descriptive powers make and unmake reality. – The New Yorker.

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.

On this day in movie history - In a Lonely Place (1950 movie & novel):

In a Lonely Place

directed by Nicholas Ray,

written by Andrew P. Solt and Edmund H. North,

based on the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes,

was released in the United States on May 17, 1950.
Music by George Antheil.

Cast:

Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid, Art Smith, Martha Stewart, Jeff Donnell, Robert Warwick, Morris Ankrum, William Ching, Steven Geray, Hadda Brooks, Jack Reynolds.

Recommended reading:

In a Lonely Place

By Dorothy B. Hughes.

Filmed as In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray.

Published by NYRB Classics.

First published 1947.

Paperback.

ISBN-10: 1681371472

ISBN-13: 978-1681371474

Description:

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.