By: James Aitchison

The 1940s saw the rise of a new genre in pulp fiction — noir.  On movie screens, Warner Brothers brought black-and-white noir masterpieces to their fullest potential; think Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon.

And while it might be fashionable to dismiss the genre as cheap fiction, in truth some of America’s greatest, most transformative literature clattered forth from the typewriters of the era.

Take two examples:

“She carried her head like a lady and her body like a snake.”

“At eight the bar was emptied of all but those whose goal was alcoholism.”

These tightly chiseled sentences captured danger, guilt and despair as no other writer could.  Dorothy Belle Hughes commanded the language of lonelieness and lust, the sense of dread and desperation, all with an overarching elegance of prose.  As one critic wrote, “her taut moral conundrums spiralled out into near chaos … she ranks among the most deeply disquieting authors ever to put pen to paper.”

Born in Kansas City, Missouri on 10 August 1904, Hughes worked as a journalist, penning poetry in her spare time, before embarking on a career in mystery fiction.  Her lodestars were British authors Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.  Her breakout novel was 1942’s The Fallen Sparrow, filmed a year later.  In 1947, In a Lonely Place — subsequently filmed with Humphrey Bogart — enshrined her as the queen of hardboiled noir.  In 1951 she received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and in 1978 she was bestowed with a Grand Master Award.  By that time she had stepped away from fiction forever.

Hughes evoked disturbing yet insightful imagery:

“How could a man ever be sure of any other man?  This was the age of treachery, the age when the lie was made dogma, when evasion was a sanctified virtue and ignorance a sacrament.  It was the age of words but the words no longer had meaning, they had subverted into the gibberish of the new jungle.”

“Once he’d had happiness but for so brief a time; happiness was made of quicksilver, it ran out of your hand like quicksilver.”

“He stood there until he was trembling with pity and rage.  Then he fled, but his flight was slow as the flight in a dream, impeded by the deep sand and the blurring hands of the fog.”

“Liquor is such a nice substitute for facing adult life.”

“He dressed quickly, not caring what he put on.  He had no plan, only to get out of this room, to get away from the unremembered shape of his dreams.”

Hughes’s trademark style is best evidenced in this passage from In a Lonely Place:  

“Her name was Mildred Atkinson and she had led a very stupid life.  Grade school, high school — Hollywood High but she was no beauty queen — business college and a job in an insurance office.  She was twenty-six years old and she was a good girl, her parents sobbed.  She played bridge with girl friends and she once taught a Sunday-school class.  She didn’t have any particular gentleman friend, she went out with several.  Not often, you could bet.  The only exciting thing that ever happened to her was to be raped and murdered …”

That single paragraph is a masterclass in great writing.