Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The Paris Review

    The Origins of American Noir

    by Megan Abbott Aug 01, 2017 6 minutes

    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. 

    Over the course of her career, Hughes wrote fourteen novels, most of them published between 1940 and 1952. She also reviewed crime fiction and wrote an award-winning critical biography of Erle Stanley Gardner, the (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. What truly sets her apart from most of her crime-fiction peers, however, is, as noted in Christine Smallwood’s Page-Turner blog post on Hughes’s final, superb novel, (1963), her abiding interest in the psychology of difference, in taking on the perspectives of those unlike herself: from street punks to political prisoners, from an African American doctor to a war refugee among the Tesuque Indians. And, in , a returning veteran.

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The Paris Review

    The Paris Review1 min read
    Life Poem 1
    A leaf falls here/there, now/thenbehind the rain, a curtain of rain,the trees in their own time.I see now that time falls in layers. There were deer there once, in the clearing,three deer, large as memory objects.They stood in a circleas if they knew
    The Paris Review1 min read
    Farah Al Qasimi
    Farah Al Qasimi’s first photographs were of the dreary New Haven winter: reflections in water, a dead cat, an angry dog. She was an undergraduate at the Yale School of Art, where in 2017 she also received her M.F.A. Since then, Al Qasimi has turned h
    The Paris Review35 min read
    An Eye In The Throat
    My father answers the phone. He is twenty-three years old, and, as everyone does in the nineties, he picks up the receiver without knowing who is calling. People call all day long, and my parents pick up and say, “Hello?” and then people say, “It’s C

    Related Books & Audiobooks