Review: In a Lonely Place

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This one seems easy to describe: it’s a serial killer novel from the point-of-view of the murderer. We see the trope all the time now, whether in something like Silence of the Lambs or Dexter.

On the other hand, that doesn’t quite do justice to what this is. Since this is written in 1947, it isn’t expanding the genre, it’s inventing it. Here’s a character in a novel who sizes up women for the kill, and it’s coming to us nearly a decade before The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Part of what makes this one so extraordinary is that it feels transgressive. It comes across with a perpetual whiff that it’s going farther than anything that’s come before it. As I read it, I found myself in a dark mood, angry at the world and looking for someone on whom to focus my frustrations. It captures a terrifying perspective on the world through banality. There’s a constant sense that something is about to explode, that neither our protagonist Dix nor Hughes herself can get away with all of it.

I like to read noir in general as an applied ethics, a kind of generic inquiry into what we should do in a world where it’s no longer clear what right or wrong means. The weight of that question usually falls on the protagonist, on the Philip Marlowe who, jaded and broke, nevertheless follows a code we can begin to recognize as existential.

In this case, though, the weight of it falls on us as readers. Hughes is deft in the way she lets us see the truth of Dix – we come to suspect him only slowly and then can’t confirm those suspicions until fairly late in the novel – so the wrongness at the heart of him emerges only slowly. He’s our protagonist; he’s a veteran of World War II who laments the lost freedom of serving as a pilot in a war that gave him purpose. As such, he demands our sympathy. We’re programmed to root for him.

Our ethical obligation as readers, then, is to check that impulse, to find a way to root against him despite our inclinations. Hughes calls on us to make a difficult, ethical choice, to condemn a man we suspect of something horrific even though we can’t be certain of that until things are almost finished. (I think that’s why it’s so uncomfortable to read this. Hughes is challenging us to be more careful readers; she makes us subjects in a psychology experiment, and we’re left with the troubling sense that we are likely imperfect in sorting out the good from the convenient.)

Anyway, all that would be enough for me to admire this, but the excellent afterword in my New York Review of Books edition – by the excellent contemporary noir author Megan Abbott – makes me see yet another dimension of this.

The real heroes of this novel are the two central women, one cast in the femme fatale mode and the other in the loyal and virtuous wife role. Where the men of the story see only what they want to see in Dix, the two women recognize a vague wrongness. They have a more finely tuned moral compass, and their suspicions are what [SPOILER] ultimately save the day.

As a result, Abbott helps me see the degree to which this is a feminist response to the hardboiled tradition. It’s a critique not just of masculinity but also of the roles into which women were cast within the genre.

I’m already mostly convinced that I’ll include one of Abbott’s novels the next time I teach my hardboiled/noir class. Now I think I might try to find room for this one as well.


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