In a Lonely Place

Before it was included in the Women Crime Writers collection published by Library of America, this book was on my radar. It is one of the earliest depictions of that thriller mainstay; the serial killer. While the narration doesn’t specifically name Dex as the killer, the reader is in no doubt. He purposely re-enters the life of an old friend from his military days only to find out that friend, Brub Nicolai, has become an L.A. Detective. Instead of disappearing or failing to pursue the friendship, Dex insinuates himself more firmly in his life, setting up a game that only Dex knows they’re playing. Oh sure, Brub is aware of a killer on the loose and he’s tortured by it and afraid for his wife Sylvia, but he has no idea the show more strangler is Dex. It’s kind of delicious. Dex alternately is jealous of their marriage and despises them for their cozy conventionality. Sylvia is at turns the most desirable and elegant woman and a vapid, colorless ball and chain. Brub is hero then dupe.

The title comes from a void in Dex’s life that he’s tried to fill with the wrong woman before. When he fails he kills. It isn’t an excuse, but a reason and his latest attempt is in the shape of Laurel Gray. At first she’s depicted as fairly reasonable and decent, but she becomes an unsatisfied woman who harps and nags; typical for its time. The misogyny and sexism was surprising to me given that a woman wrote this book. I don’t know if Hughes was including it as an indictment or if it was just such the conventional view of women that she wasn’t aware of doing it.

Things get a bit spoilery if you can't spot the obvious.

Dex is a typically arrogant male who thinks every woman’s reaction to him must be intense attraction. I made a note that Sylvia’s reaction on first meeting Dex, which he mistook, was actually wariness or fear, and it was. She sensed his wrongness and in the end it undoes him. He takes chances and liberties that only a psychopath would. In that sense he reminded me of Ripley, justifying his every crime and killing with the idea that because it’s him it’s ok and that his victims deserve whatever they get. He’s repulsive. A modern writer would surely blame Dex’s mother, but Hughes doesn’t offer any reason for Dex’s defects. They just are. There’s a great sense of dissipation about him and Hughes wrote a great scene for him acting the distraught innocent when he “learns” of a woman’s death in England.

Overall the book works really well and is told with a light detachment that keeps things from being too desperate. There is no victim in his sights as such, but an overall sense of danger and dread permeates the book. That and we want him to be caught, punished and thoroughly brought down. That’s kind of where things get a bit iffy though with some plot holes and oddities I just can’t imagine happening. Like when Brub (oh what a name!) and his boss get involved in the murder in England, the one Dex reacted so histrionically to. They lay out the case and note similarities to the current killings. Every conversation they have had with Dex about the crimes paints a picture of a killer that is a dead ringer for Dex himself, but suspicion never turns his way.

Then it does and Hughes sets up a few subtle clues for the reader to know that finally, Dex is in a net. There’s a lovely set up and then they have him. Fingerprints come to light and other evidence and he’s caught, becoming a blubbering idiot bitten by the confessional bug. It’s a nice way to end it and satisfying both in the villain getting nabbed and from a dramatic perspective. It reminded me a lot of crime movies of this era; no coda, just a solid collar and scene.

In tone and style it reminded me of A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin that came out some years later. They both feature a sociopathic young man trying to get above his station no matter the cost. Working is below them. They despise the idle rich but long to be one. Both use and abuse the women in their orbits, but have skill in hiding who they are and keeping the women compliant. There are swishy clubs, money, sex and increasing desperation. Levin’s has a more clever construction, but both are excellent. show less

In A Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes is a classic psychological suspense story that is considered one of the finest examples of Noir. It stands the test of time with it’s setting of post-war Los Angeles as it exposes the main character as one of the most memorable villains of all time.

With it’s hard-boiled prose, intense characters, and dark atmosphere the story pulls the reader into the world of Dixon Steele. He is unemployed but educated, dependant upon the allowance that his uncle provides while he pretends to be writing a book when in fact, he is a hunter of young women. He lives in an absent friend’s apartment, drives the friend’s car, uses his charge cards and even wears his clothes. He looks up an old friend and finds to show more his surprise the friend is now a police detective who is working on the ongoing case of a serial killer. Dix decides to encourage the friendship so that he can obtain information of how the police are working this case.

In a Lonely Place was a stellar read. The author, Dorothy Hughes, delves into the mind of a psychopath and we are treated to a dark but fascinating character study. The story unfolds entirely from Dixon’s viewpoint. What he sees and feels is expressed through his narration and the author does an amazing job of showing the various layers of this man’s personality. show less

Blimey, what a book this is. Published in 1947, In a Lonely Place is murky, hard boiled, dark and delicious. Set in Los Angeles just after WW2, it’s the story of Dix Steele, a Princeton grad and former fighter pilot. He’s a predatory, angry misogynist and a serial killer. Being inside the head of Dix Steele is unforgettable and deeply unpleasant. His paranoia creates an incredibly claustrophobic novel, the sexual tension jumps off the page. What makes it stand out is Hughes’s ability to link violence and misogyny. The strong characters in the novel are female and they ultimately bring about his downfall. It makes it a compelling read. Noir doesn’t get better than this.

All killer, no filler noir with the double-satisfaction of a serial strangler POV and a case solved by a pair of cool dames.

Great character names (Dix Steele!), perfect title, ideal setting in the clammy, foglit environs of Hollywood and Santa Monica. Hughes nails the two noir essentials of atmosphere and moral ambiguity and doesn't waste a word in doing so.

Now for the film version!

This is an underrated noir classic that for me surpassed such better known novels as The Killer Inside Me or The Postman Always Rings Twice. Hughes writes from the point of a view of a serial killer who won't quite admit to himself what he is, depicting his breakdown as the police close in. Two things I appreciated: she never shows a murder on the page but instead lets the reader read between the lines, and the two female characters in the novel--although the killer views them as opposite "types"--are both real women who are instrumental in bringing him to justice. I recommend the edition with the excellent afterword by Megan Abbott.

“Once he’d had happiness but for so brief a time; happiness was made of quicksilver, it ran out of your hand like quicksilver.”

Quite a different story than what would become of it in its film adaptation, the film noir classic from Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, but perhaps more enjoyable because of it. Here we get a Dix Steele who predates Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley in his grifting to assume the lifestyle of an acquaintance he’s disposed of, as well as a serial killer, though he’s less charming and more tortured than Ripley. As the story unfolds, we gradually understand what he’s done in the past as well as just how desperate he in the present as he tries to keep a step ahead of the show more cops, who are led by a friend of his from the military.

As Megan Abbott puts it in her brilliant Afterword, Dorothy Hughes had an “uncanny grasp of the connection between violence and misogyny and embittered masculinity.” Dix has returned from the war, having lost the status of his fighter pilot uniform, and adrift. In a remarkable inversion of the traditional dangers of a femme fatale in noir literature and film, he’s the danger, and it’s the clear-eyed women, both his friend’s wife and the actress in the apartment complex he becomes obsessed over, who gradually come to understand just how violently unhinged he is.

Written in a pulp style has a certain appeal, but it must be admitted that the writing is not stellar and there are certain lines that are unintentionally funny (“She was probably a wonderful woman to bed with; no waste motion, quietness”) or cringe inducing (“Her name was Mildred Atkinson and she had led a very stupid life. … The only exciting thing that had ever happened to her was to be raped and murdered”). There is also an understated level of sex to go with the violence (“She didn’t want food, she wanted what he wanted. ‘You’ll get it,’ he told her”). However, there was certainly a sense of honesty to the way with this story was told, one that was altered to make Bogart a sympathetic figure in the film, and I liked how the internal tension ratcheted up in Steele’s mind until an inevitable ending. Worth reading, but probably only if you like the genre. show less

This is a very good book, and very different from the classic movie based on it. Its themes run hard through noir as a genre, through masculinity and femininity, and through the power to define life’s challenges.

It is true noir, not a mystery. We know Dix Steele, the unsympathetic main character, to be a murderer, a serial murderer, from the beginning. The question is why, and what’s next?

Dix is a returning WWII vet, a former fighter pilot. He comes to Los Angeles to sublet an apartment from an old college acquaintance, Mel Terriss.

Taking over Terriss’ apartment, clothes, and car gives Dix a patina of status. He looks like any guy who's making it. But he’s not. He’s living off an allowance from his uncle while he ostensibly show more tries his hand at becoming a professional writer.

None of this stuff is really working,

What he actually does is play the role of a guy who's making it, biding time while he fails to write and while what money he has runs out.

In the meantime he watches and thinks about women. Women fall into the same constellation of the guy not making it, resenting not making it, not being a somebody like he was when he was a fighter pilot during the war, and keeping up appearances. Women are out of reach, the women that the guys who are really making it make it with.

On a reliable monthly cycle, the swirl of resentment, frustration, and misogyny boils over, and someone dies. A woman, strangled.

Dix the former fighter pilot also enjoys the chase. He’s addicted to a downward spiral of suspicion and anger in the chase of a woman. And he’s drawn into a chase with his wartime buddy, Brub Nicolai, now a detective for the Los Angeles PD.

The heart of the novel then flows and crashes through his game of cat and mouse with Brub (and Brub’s clever and perceptive wife, Sylvia) and his chase of his dreamgirl, Laurel Gray. Laurel may have her own faults, but she doesn’t deserve Dix. Her faults only serve to light Dix’s fuse.

It’s got that great noir feel of nothing-good-can-come-of-this. And it doesn’t, not to give anything away, since it’s pretty clear from the beginning. Dix is flawed and self-destructive to the core, and it goes back through all the murders to the original in the series of women he didn’t make it with, Brucie in Scotland, before he returned to America from the war.

When you read the novel, it’s as much a ride you’re getting on as a story you’re following. And since it’s written from Dix’s perspective, you get to go down the same black hole he’s going down.

The movie version, like I mentioned, is really a different story. It was cut off at the knees by Joseph Breen and the Motion Picture Code. The serial murderer was out, and the probably innocent suspect was in.

The misogyny survived, which we might want to reflect on a bit. “Woman” here is an opponent, an object of psychological struggle. You see it especially in Dix’s relationship with Brub’s wife Sylvia, as well of course as Laurel. He wrestles constantly, in his own mind, with what he thinks to be Sylvia’s suspicions. It begins the moment he meets her.

Dix’s ill-fated relationship with Laurel is romantic by contrast, but romance here is also a psychological struggle, mainly Dix vs. Dix. Because it’s inside Dix, it’s a struggle between Dix and every woman, automatically. An opponent before she even enters the scene, as happened with Sylvia.

In Dix’s mind, the relationship between men and women is a predator/predator relationship, and it becomes self-confirming as a threatened woman fights back.

This is great noir stuff.

Just to add, Megan Abbott’s Afterword is short but so straightforwardly incisive that it’s hard to review the book without borrowing from her. It’s well placed as an “afterword” — so don’t read it until you’ve read the book. show less