miker asked recently,
"What about Dorothy B. Hughes? Is the SO BLUE MARBLE a good
one? I've heard that RIDE A PINK HORSE is her best effort but
that it's a bit surrealistic, and I'm not hot on that at all.
Are her novels hardboiled or not?"
SO BLUE MARBLE has some hard-edged aspects to it, but is more
in the mode of a Buchan (39 Steps) thriller. The heroine is
learning on the job, and her escapes are not quite
believeable. Not quite up to Ambler standards.
THE FALLEN SPARROW (movie made starring John Garfield) showed
Hughes moving to a male protagonist who has been released
from a Spanish prison (Span. Civl War era) so that he can
lead a lame-footed villain to friends in NYC. Gets inside the
head of someone who is still suffering the trauma of being
imprisoned and has to determine and pursue the murderer of a
friend of his. I think she's achieved something hard-boiled
in that novel.
RIDE THE PINK HORSE (also a film, starring & directed by
Robert Montgomery) is much better than Blue Marble, with a
gunman named Sailor waiting to confront his old boss in Santa
Fe, during a festival celebrating the casting out of old bad
spirit of winter (Sosobra or something like). It is
definitely hard-boiled, and very dark. It has some
nightmarish qualities, if that's what surreal means. It's
quite interesting in its mixing of Indian, Mexican, and tough
urban (Chicago) perspectives.
IN A LONELY PLACE (also a Nicholas Ray film with Humphrey
Bogart and Gloria Grahame) is possibly her best, about a
writer who may or may not be a serial killer in LA.
My view of her--which wrote up in a paper, but have never
published--is that she may be the first major woman writer of
noir novels. Sparrow and Pink Horse were published in
1943-45, as I remember.
Bill Hagen
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