A review by kingofspain93
In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes

4.5

noir is, I think, about despair and the bitterness of hatred. it's the next link in a filmic and literary chain of evolution, following the western and the studio drama and preceding horror and melodrama. it's an American literary reaction to a world of relativism, global movements, the impossibility of keeping them down on the farm when they've shot at Germans and Japanese and raped their way across whole continents. with the Indian Wars wrapping up, Hawai’i and Guam and Palau and Puerto Rico and the Philippines and Samoa and a dozen other countries annexed, the U.S. was moving towards its new normal of being involved in as many foreign wars as possible. 

into this big, disinterested, unknowable mess steps Dixon Steele. master criminal, quick thinker, nerves of steel, and petulant child, jealous boyfriend, delusional paranoiac, rapist. what’s one more woman dead on the side of the road? when the whole world is spinning around you, when L.A. is too big to catch one guy, what are you going to do to stop him? he’s the american war machine in a suit, too aware of the scope of history to not have his own moral code, but too much a man and a soldier to reject the misogyny that is his promised frontier.

Hughes pitches a great noir premise about a guy who’s too smart for the people around him, then takes him apart by undoing all of his delusions of grandeur one misstep at a time. all the men around him are ready to believe Dix is a good old boy, but the intelligent and careful women are his undoing. they know what men are. and so Dix is slowly revealed not to be the smooth operator that he sells himself as, and the world of his interiority gives way to the perspectives of others and we are finally left with him as he is: a man, which is to say a worm. if some of the stretches of Dix’s feverish panic are too drawn out, the ultimate impact of In a Lonely Place excuses most pacing issues. an anti-american classic.