In a Lonely Place – Dorothy B. Hughes
In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes / 222-page paperback published in 2023 in the Penguin Modern Classics Crime & Espionage Series
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‘The new crime and espionage series from Penguin Classics makes for a mouth-watering prospect’ Daily Telegraph
Los Angeles, the late 1940’s. A serial killer stalks the foggy streets at night …
Dix Steele, a former fighter pilot, moved to L.A. after the war, looking for a new life. But the city is gripped by fear of a murderer in its midst. Dix, however, is not scared. And when he bumps into his old friend Brub, now a detective on the trail of the culprit, he is excited to follow the police’s progress. A dark and terrible truth is revealed, in a noir novel like no other.
“Dorothy B. Hughes was in a class of her own. To be a female author of hard-boiled fiction back in the 1940s was unusual enough, but to write a first-person narrative from the viewpoint of a male serial killer was breaking new ground by anybody’s standards. She marked out this territory years before most other writers even knew it existed.”–Max Decharne, author of Hardboiled Hollywood: The Origins of Great Crime Films
Dorothy B. Hughes (1904-93) was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and lived most of her life in New Mexico. A journalist and a poet, she began publishing hard-boiled crime novels in 1940, three of which were made into successful films: The Fallen Sparrow (1943), Ride the Pink Horse (1947) and In a Lonely Place (1950). In her later years, Hughes reviewed crime novels for the LA Times, the New York Herald Tribune and other papers. She was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.
