NYRB Classics discussion

The June mystery/crime book selection is In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes and with an afterword by Megan Abbott. 206 pp

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.

This topic will be for the discussion of the novel and if you have not yet read the novel be wary because spoilers may be included in the discussion.

I have this book and thought I would read along this month, but the serial killer of women was too dark for me right now.

I am reading this currently too. It is keeping me on the edge of my seat. The author has a way of describing the fog and sea that really puts you in the scene. I feel I can hear the waves crashing and have to exert some effort to peer through the fog. The gravel roads he traverses and brush he conceals himself in are so real. Anyway, enjoying so far - even if he's totally creepy.

I really want to read this but I just can't this month. Way too many things going on. I'll see if I can get to it in the second half.

Reviews:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...


https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2016...

As stated in Jacqui Wine's review Nicholas Ray's film is different but also a classic.
https://youtu.be/68C2IFX60CU?si=Hv07n...

I have procrastinated all month in making further comments on our reads for this and last month. Part of the reason is business, and part is because the heat takes every creative thought out of me. So I have been waiting for inspiration while catching up on less demanding tasks, but now I can put it off no further. Hughes' novel is the easier to tackle so I will address it first.

I think the usual praise points the book out as an early serial killer novel where we are encouraged to identify with the killer to some degree. A second addressed point is the noirish atmospheric feel to the novel.

I think the California setting is one of the author's more interesting choices and a reason for the novel's continued success. We are used to the immediate access of visuals of almost anywhere in the world presently with our technological advances and I think that lessens our actual appreciation of how little we knew of different geographical locations before these advancements unless we spent some time there. In the U.S. we were privy to the most information about New York, and Los Angeles, because of Hollywood, quickly followed as we felt we knew these locations because of our exposure to films and later television. But the views of these places were very romanticized, molded by what little we read and saw in photographs or on film but further how we then imagined the whole from that little we saw. California becomes an "American dream, " based on an idea of Los Angeles by way of its portrayal by Hollywood. And along with romanticizing our dream of the places we imagine we also romanticize our nightmares of those places. Hughes feeds our imagining of the nightmare.

A second thing Hughes does that I think is notable is that she constantly shifts and manipulates our empathies from character to character evincing feelings from sympathy to disgust and I don't think we ever are quite settled at the end. Is our villain a unique problem or a product of war trauma? Are we left with positive or negative feelings about Laurel?

One thing I think we can agree on is how negatively we can judge Dix's misogyny. Whether it is fueled by his trauma or something else, Hughes doesn't really tell but it is balanced with the misandry of Laurel which I think we feel is definitely a result of male inflicted trauma. I am going to leave my thoughts there and if you care to share some of your own, jump in. But this was a great summer read for me.

Excellent review, Sam, I hope to read this some day.

This was a great book, which I read at the very end of 2024.

Very confused by the tone of the film version. I guess with Humphrey Bogart as "Dix," it was bound to be less noir, less psychopathic, but it was a hard adjustment after reading the book.

Okay, you convinced me to buy it, even though it's too late for the readalong.

Miraculously, I got to this quickly, and I agree with Sam that for me the absolute best thing was the LA setting. I've never been to California (except for a very aggravating transfer in LAX) and I loved the way it's portrayed here.

Although you say, Sam, that she gives us the California of our nightmares, I think the book continues to appeal because the setting reads very nostalgic now. It's a pre-highway LA, and very false in its depiction of a totally white and largely upper-class experience, but there's so much nature there too--the abandoned road in the woods where Mildred Atkinson is dumped, the beach of course. The interiors read nostalgic too-- Sylvia and Brub's peculiar chair, their good-taste printes of O'Keefe and Rivera the "modern bleached wood and glass and chrome" of Mel Terriss's apartment, and all the descriptions of Dix's clothes. It's so... vintage. Of course it was all modern at the time and the equivalent of a modern writers saying "she shouldered her Gucci bag."

The setting reminded me a lot of my hometown, Vancouver, curiously.

No great surprises in the plot but it ticked along nicely and managed to generate quite a bit of suspense even despite having no surprises (something our twist-happy era could stand to learn from).

I do want to read this, but it’s not calling to me right now.