In a Lonely Place is an eerie book.
You might have read it, but it's more likely you know the 1950 Nicholas Ray movie of the same name which, although it was based on Dorothy B. Hughes' 1947 novel, has a very different plot line. In the movie, Humphrey Bogart plays a screenwriter named Dix Steele charged with adapting a trashy novel. He can't be bothered to read the book, so he picks up Mildred, a hat check girl who is enthusiastic about the book and takes her to his apartment to have her explain it to him "in her own words."
As they're walking across the courtyard to get to his apartment, Dix meets the eyes of a new tenant, a starlet named Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame). He is immediately smitten, and while we're not entirely sure that his intentions toward Mildred were completely honorable, he assures her that all he wants from her is a description of the story. After she tells him the plot, he gives her cab fare home.
But Mildred winds up murdered that night and Steele comes under suspicion. As police investigate, he falls in love with Gray and the two begin a tenuous affair. But she can't trust the angry, sullen Steele. Even though he's cleared in the end, their love can't last.
Ray's movie is now considered a classic film noir, but it's really a critique of Hollywood that holds up with two similar, better known films released that same year -- Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve. In many ways, it's Ray's most personal and impressive film. It came four years before the remarkable Johnny Guitar and five before Rebel Without a Cause. I'd always considered it a superior work of art to the novel it was based on, which I assumed was a piece of pulp not dissimilar to the novel Mildred summed up for Dix.
But I hadn't read In a Lonely Place until a couple of weeks ago, when I picked up the Library of America's two-volume set Women Crime Writers of the 1940s and 1950s (edited by Sarah Weinman, $70). While the film remains a deeply interesting, provocative piece of Hollywood "termite art," with Bogart giving maybe his best performance and the strained relation between Grahame and Ray (who were married at the time) lending it a queasy meta quality, the book is just extraordinary. It may be my favorite piece of '40s-era noir -- and I've read all of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and pretty deeply in to Jim Thompson's oeuvre. (Thompson sure wrote a lot of books.)
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Ray's movie is a lot of things, and one of those things is a work of art structured from a masculine perspective, what feminist critics call the "male gaze." This is complicated by Ray's particular sensitivity and rumored bisexuality, but by and large In a Lonely Place is a movie made by men for men.
Hughes' novel, on the other hand, is obviously written by a woman, and it somehow manages to be far stranger and more realistic than the film version. Hughes' In a Lonely Place is narrated by Dix Steele, but not the wrongly accused screenwriter who Bogart played.
This Steele is not an innocent screenwriter who loses his chance at a great love because he's an angry and odd man who's suspected of being worse. This Steele is a serial killer who stalks and presumably rapes women before strangling them to death. Ray's film borrows the semi-glamorous settings of Los Angeles (Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Hollywood) and a few character names from the book. The police detectives have the same names, and one of them is Steele's old war buddy. A character named Mildred is murdered. But despite these points of commonality, the stories are different.
There's nothing that feels dated about Hughes' book. The prose is compact and lean and she has a wonderful way of letting us in on what the unreliable Steele can't quite bring himself to tell us. I don't know that the concept of "serial killer" had much currency in 1947, although it must have, even though the term is never used. (If I hadn't known the date, I would have guessed the book was written in the '60s.)
And there's a frightening verisimilitude in the way Hughes explicated Steele's motive and interior monologue. It feels chillingly accurate, and I've spoken with serial killers. (I once debriefed Henry Lee Lucas in a Western Sizzlin' steakhouse. Long story.)
Though apparently Hughes dismissed the idea that she was a "feminist" writer, what may be most striking about the book is its strong female characters. Here, Gray may be toying with Dix and the case is actually broken by the wife of his war buddy detective. There's a sense of the isolation a returning war hero must feel after the glitter and confetti have been swept away and it's time to find a job that won't be as exciting or important as saving the world.
I've read parts of other novels in the volume. Vera Caspary's Laura (1943) is quite funny, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's The Blank Wall (1947) is remarkable for its crackling prose. (Both these novels are, like In a Lonely Place, probably better remembered in their movie versions. Otto Preminger directed Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews and Clifton Webb in the 1944 film version of Laura, while The Blank Wall was made into The Reckless Moment in 1949 with Joan Bennett and served as the inspiration for 2001's The Deep End, which starred Tilda Swinton.)
Sarah Weinman, the writer and critic who edited the volume for the Library of America, writes in her introduction that the "midcentury generation of American women crime writers created a tradition that I call 'domestic suspense.' Writers like Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Charlotte Armstrong, Vera Caspary, Helen Nielsen, Nedra Tyre and Ursula Curtiss were less concerned with pre-existing rules of the genre, instead preferring to blur boundaries, write outside the lines. They featured a more subtle approach to the human condition, where the most important dilemmas centered on the vulnerability of children, a threatening spouse or the subtle sadism of social mores. The overly fragile heroines gave way to more complicated, layered protagonists who chafed against pre-war roles and found inner strength battling dread from all corners. These characters differed considerably from those in the novels of their male peers, who were more often ornamental displays or incidental players in the theater of the brooding, hard-boiled male detective."
It occurs to me that the reason these novels aren't as well-known today as similar works by male authors is that a lot of those guys -- the prolific Thompson perhaps chief among them -- were dragged back into the relative spotlight by Barry Gifford's Black Lizard, a publishing house that, starting in 1984, published in mass market paperback more than 75 "rediscovered forgotten classic crime fiction ... novels" that had originally been published from the '30s to the '60s. (Black Lizard also published a number of original novels by Gifford and Jim Nisbet.)
And for whatever reason (probably because Gifford had a particular taste for old downmarket paperback originals) Black Lizard's authors were overwhelmingly male. The house published 14 novels by Thompson, who subsequently -- and posthumously, for he died in 1977 -- had his reputation elevated to the first rank of American crime novelists. David Goodis, Peter Rabe and Harry Whittington each had six novels republished by Black Lizard. Only two women were on the house's roster -- they reprinted two books by Helen Nielsen, and Gertrude Stein's Blood on the Dining Room Floor.
So while there was a huge revival of interest in noir fiction in the the '80s, most of the women who toiled in the genre were overlooked, even though, when their work was first published, it was generally considered superior to the pulpy stuff Black Lizard later valorized.
Anyway, consider this two-volume set corrective, supplementary and welcome. And you will want to check out its complementary website at womencrime.loa.org.
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About the only criticism of Sanderia Faye's debut novel Mourner's Bench (University of Arkansas, $19.95) is that her title has doomed the book to be perpetually confused with Susan Dodd's admirable 1998 novel The Mourner's Bench. Otherwise this is a flawless, sensitive story about an 8-year-old black girl, Sarah Jones, determined to take her place with the 12-year-olds awaiting baptism on the titular bench (actually a row of chairs) at the front of First Baptist Church in Maeby, Ark.
It's 1964 and Sarah is eager to fast-forward her life in order to emancipate herself from her mother, Esther Mae, who has recently returned to town after a five-year stint in the big city. And Esther's brought with her some big-city airs, including a heightened awareness of the civil rights struggle. With the help of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, she is trying to organize her recalcitrant, suspicious community. Most of them, including her mother Muhdea and grandmother Granny -- who have been looking after Sarah during Esther's urban sojourn -- just wish Esther would head back up north.
All this is filtered through Sarah's naive but intelligent perspective, and Faye has a sure command of her never-simplistic characters. As you might guess, Sarah eventually comes to understand the importance of what her mother's doing, but the pacing and cadences of this meditative, clear-eyed work never feel abrupt or false.
Email:
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Style on 09/13/2015