Five years ago, through some good luck, I began working for Criminal Element. It wasn’t the destination I had in mind when I started my job search, but after an interview for a role where I wasn’t quite a perfect fit, my interviewer said he might have a different opportunity for me. Enter Criminal Element.…
I am approaching this post on In a Lonely Place as a page-to-screen piece, where I’ll compare notes on the novel of that title and the movie that goes by the same name. But really, there’s little in common between Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1947 book and the 1950 film directed by Nicholas Ray. Let’s talk…
Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s is a box set of work by Dorothy B. Hughes, Vera Caspary, Patricia Highsmith, Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong, Dolores Hitchens, Helen Eustis, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. The website for the collection is worth exploring, with galleries, also essays from Sarah Weinman, the editor, and…
Power corrupts. We know this, right? Willis Douglass, one of the main characters from Ride the Pink Horse— Dorothy B. Hughes’s superb 1946 work of noir fiction—embodies the maxim. Douglass, a former Illinois Senator, was once a noble enough man to take in a Chicago street punk named Sailor, put the kid through some schooling…
A wide variety of writers and artists have been drawn to New Mexico. D.H. Lawrence spent the end of his life there, as did Roger Zelazny. Both Cormac McCarthy and George R.R. Martin live near Santa Fe—have fun picturing the two of them getting together for a bowl of green chile stew. N. Scott Momaday,…
