Dorothy B. Hughes

Dorothy B. Hughes (née Dorothy Belle Flanagan; August 10, 1904 – May 6, 1993) was an American crime writer, literary critic, poet, and biographer of Erle Stanley Gardner. Her poetry collection Dark Certainty (published in 1931) won the 1930 Younger Poets Prize from Yale University Press. The successful films Ride the Pink Horse (1947) and In a Lonely Place (1950) were based on novels she published in 1946 and 1947, respectively. For her literary criticism she received two Edgar Allan Poe Awards: one in 1951 and another in 1976. In 1978 she was honored (along with Daphne du Maurier and Ngaio Marsh) with the Grand Master Award for literary achievement from the Mystery Writers of America.

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Quotes

This was Fiesta. Overhead were strings of colored lights. In the center of the square was a small green park, trees and benches and a bandstand draped in red-and-orange bunting. A low cement wall ran around the park with entrances at each corner. Entrances hung with grotesque paper maché standards. In the street that circled the park, were thatched booths, smelling of food, the acrid smell of chile; stacked with cases of pop, decorated with gimcracks, cheap canes topped with celluloid dolls wiggling feathers, and cheap sticks with flimsy yellow birds floating from them, balloons on brittle wooden sticks.This was Fiesta: a run-down carnival.
- "Part One Zozobra. Section One". Ride the Pink Horse. Open Road Media. 2013. ISBN 9781480426962. (188 pages; 1st edition published in 1946 by Duell, Sloan and Pearce)

“We didn’t know it was only the first then. It was a girl down on Skid Row. She was a nice enough kid for the life she lived, I guess. Danced in a bump-and-grind house down there. We found her in an alley. Strangled.: He picked up his glass, emptied it. “No clues. Nothing. …”
- In a Lonely Place. Bantam Books. 1979. p. 30. ISBN 9780553121148. (214 pages; 1st edition 1947 published by Duell, Sloan and Pearce; 1st part of quote 2nd part of quote)

Reading Dorothy B. Hughes’s novel In a Lonely Place for the first time is like finding the long-lost final piece to an enormous puzzle. Within its Spanish bungalows, its eucalyptus-scented shadows, you feel as though you’ve discovered a delicious and dark secret, a tantalizing page-turner with sneakily subversive undercurrents. While only intermittently in print for much of the last half century, its influence on crime fiction is unsung yet inescapable. From Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson to Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Harris, nearly every “serial killer” tale of the last seventy years bears its imprint—both in terms of its sleek, relentless style and its claustrophobic “mind of the criminal” perspective. But its larger influence derives from Hughes’s uncanny grasp of the connection between violence and misogyny and an embattled masculinity. And its importance extends beyond form or genre and into cultural mythos: the birth of American noir.
- Megan Abbott, (August 1, 2017) "The Origins of American Noir". The Paris Review.