Tuesday, December 31, 2024

In a Lonely Place


I have been reading some novels by classic writers and picked up this one by Dorothy B. Hughes.  She wrote 14 crime and detective novels and was well known for this title which was one of the first to portray a serial killer from the killer's POV. There was also a movie made based on this book starring Humphrey Bogart. It's 1940's Los Angeles and Dix Steele, a former fighter pilot is struggling to find his place in society. Hughes recognized that, when men returned from the war, women's expectations were altered as many of them had gone from being consigned to a purely domestic life to becoming an essential part of the workforce.  I love this description from the New York Review of Books:

"A classic California noir with a feminist twist, this prescient 1947 novel exposed misogyny in post-World War II American society, making it far ahead of its time.
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..."

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