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Thursday, February 15, 2018

Review: In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes

Reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith. Dix Steele is an ex-Army fighter jock living in Los Angeles and surviving nicely on a monthly check from his uncle. He's living in the apartment, wearing the clothes and driving the car of Mel Torries who has supposedly sublet everything to him and taken off for Rio. One evening he accidentally bumps into his best friend from the war, another fighter pilot, married to Sylvia, who is now a detective with the police force. There has been a series of women strangled by some unknown killer who leaves no clues or traces. Steele both loves and hates women and Sylvia, it turns out, has her suspicions of Steele.

This is a deliciously psychological page-turner as we watch Steele descend further and further into darkness. I have to disagree with Megan Abbott's analysis at the end of the book. "To his mind, the enemy is not the war, its trauma, but what men face upon their return: staid domesticity, the strictures of class, emasculation. And these threats are embodied wholly in women. Women, whose penetrating gazes are far mightier than his sword."  Given this female perspicacity, I was puzzled by some of their actions that brought them into dangerous proximity to Steele. We only see the world through Steele's warped perception, and his view is hardly the most reliable so it's difficult to know just what the other characters are really thinking; indeed, what might be really happening. We are never privy to any of the violence, either, only the results, but even then everything is nebulous.

What is undeniable is the influence Hughes had on Highsmith and her Tom Ripley, James Cain, and the other practitioners of fifties noir. I will certainly seek out the rest of her novels.

 

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