Hey, I actually got the gig I mentioned a while ago to write a short appreciation of Dorothy Hughes thanks to the wonderful and talented MEGAN ABBOT. I’m not really sure what the book is going to be called or when it’s coming out, but it’s evidently about female noir writers. Maybe they’ll give me a copy if they like this. Here’s the results:

Dorothy Hughes

When someone tries to tell me women can’t write hard boiled fiction, I just wave Dorothy B. Hughes’s Ride the Pink Horse in front of their face. It’s one of the most hard boiled books ever – char-broiled really – something that’s apparent as soon as the reader discovers that the protagonist’s name is simply "Sailor." All the classic elements are there – the exotic setting of Santa Fe during Festival, the haunted, hunted man with a shady past, the innocent female in the midst of corruption, and an overwhelming atmosphere of inevitable doom leading to a final line worthy of Samuel Beckett, "Blindly, he stumbled on." And of course the result of all this darkness is an absolutely enjoyable read.

Hughes began as a poet and kept her lyric touch throughout a long and varied career. None of her other books are as perfectly hard boiled as Ride the Pink Horse, but her remarkable talent for creating character and generating suspense is apparent in all of them. Her first novel The So Blue Marble is a delicate, somewhat fey confection, but, like many noir novelists World War Two seemed to darken her vision. Her war novel The Fallen Sparrow is a tightly wound spy story, featuring the chilling, unforgettable villain "Wobblefoot," determined to bring the fascist terror he perfected in the Spanish Civil War to the United States.

Hughes captured the postwar spirit of paranoia and disillusionment in the harrowing In a Lonely Place. The anti-hero, Dix, is an ex-flyer who misses "the feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the sky" he knew in the service, and who is having a hard time blunting the sharp hyper awareness of combat enough to adjust to the dull reality of civilian life. And then there’s his troubling obsession with that elusive strangler who’s been preying on the women of Los Angeles. In a Lonely Place is the masterful portrayal of a man and a society in which the defeat of an external enemy has only served to unleash the darker spirits within.

As the golden age of noir wound down so did Hughes’s productivity. She continued to be a faithful member of the mystery community and wrote sporadically, her last novels exhibiting the same prescient sensitivity towards minorities and social inequality as her earliest. From the beginning Hughes championed the thriller as a worthy vehicle for serious writing, and her impressive body of work more than proves her point.