Dorothy B. Hughes - In a Lonely Place




A crime story in the hard-boiled detective / film noir style set in LA and published in 1947.

I'm not giving anything away when I tell you the criminal is the narrator and we, as readers, are in his head. Dix Steele, at a loose end in LA, connects with an old war buddy who is now a police detective on the case of finding a serial killer. As a reader I was intrigued by his psychology, and, to be honest I didn't catch on about some clues as early as I should have. I knew he had to be caught (it's morally right) but I had no idea how. Also, he's kind of charming and cool, and we don't see the details of his crimes, so we can accept him as the people around him accept him. And there's the rub! The women around him are suspicious though, so there's some consolation in that. 

I quite liked this: 'Lochner was the tall, thin man. His clothes were a little too big for him, as if he'd loss weight worrying.' 

I was quite shocked by the casual cruelty of this, after the newspaper reporting of the murdered girl, saying how she was a good girl (as is only too familiar): 'The only exciting thing that had ever happened to her was to be raped and murdered. Even then she'd only been subbing for someone else.' 

The film based on the novel is quite different. It stars Humphrey Bogart as Dix and Gloria Grahame (the subject of the Netflix movie 'Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool') and is more glamorous than the setting of the novel. In the novel a principle of the criminal's modus operandi is that he is a normal looking guy and no-one pays attention to him. He says he is a writer but he doesn't write. In the film, Bogart is distinctive looking and is a Hollywood writer hanging out with celebrities, so it can't play out in the same way.




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