Source: Books and Writers

Dorothy Belle Hughes (1904-1993) was an American mystery writer, who also had a career as a critic. Hughes wrote fourteen crime and mystery novels. Hughes was born in Missouri and attended university in Missouri, New Mexico and New York. She married Levi Allan Hughes in 1932. Her best-known works include Ride the Pink Horse (1946) and In a Lonely Place (1947), perhaps Hughes's greatest novel. The So Blue Marble (1940) was chosen as one of the Haycraft-Queen cornerstones. For her criticism Hughes won a 1950 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Hughes lived and worked for the majority of her life in New Mexico.

In 1940 Hughes published her first novel, The So Blue Marble. The protagonist is a divorced woman, a fashion designer, who is drawn into a violent quest for a missing treasure - a tiny blue marble that contains "hieroglyphs telling the secrets of the greatest lost civilization, of the day when the sun was harnessed, as we would like to harness it, when gravitation was controlled as we haven't dreamed of controlling it." Will Cuppy called the book "glittering, but not hard-boiled." Hughes's understated style was partly a result of hard editing - her first editor demanded a cut of 25,000 words from the manuscript and eliminated most of the story's unrealistic elements. The So Blue Marble had preceded several unpublished works, but after it Hughes began delivering, on average, a book a year until 1952, when she stopped publishing novels for eleven years.

Hughes also wrote the history of the University of New Mexico. She made her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, using Southwest for backgroud in the novels. Three of Hughes's books were successfully made into films: The Fallen Sparrow (1942), starring John Garfield, Ride the Pink Horse, directed by Robert Montgomery, and In a Lonely Place, directed by Nicholas Ray.

At the peak of her career Hughes stopped writing novels, explaining that her domestic responsibilities made writing difficult: her mother was ill, she was taking care of her grandchildren, and she simply hadn't the tranquillity required to write. From 1940 to 1979 she reviewed mysteries for the Albuquerque Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Herald-Tribune and other newspapers. In 1978 Hughes was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. She won her second Edgar Allan Poe award for her critical biography, Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason. Hughes died on May 6, 1993.

Hughes produced relatively few short stories. The style of 'The Black and White Blues' (1959), about jazz music, extortion, and racial hatred, was praised by the critic and mystery writer Bill Pronzini in American Pulp (1997, ed. by Ed Gorman, Bill Pronzini, Martin H. Greenberg). In the story, set in Missouri, a young white girl asks a black musician, a clarinet player, to drive her home after the band has finished its gig. She admires his car, a cream color Chrysler, sees that he has much money, and a big diamond ring. When he kisses her she wipes her mouth and cries: "You dirty nigger. They'll lynch you for this. They'll lynch you!" To keep her silent the musician gives her the diamond ring. "Manager is pretty mad. That good clarinet-paying Negro went back to Chicago. Gave up his job and went back. Didn't say why, just acted kinda nervous. Didn't want to stay no more. Fritz, the orchestra owner, was pretty mad. Clarinet Negro borrowed some money offa him to go."

Most of Hughes's detective fiction centers around outsiders, haunted loners, or upper-class characters involved in evil intrigues. Hughes herself acknowledged her debt to such writers as Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and William Faulkner. In The Fallen Sparrow (1942) the protagonist is a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, who returns to home to find himself facing again the experiences of war. The Expendable Man (1963) became famous for its sudden twist of the plot, revealed in one sentence after some fifty pages. The protagonist is Hugh Densmore, a young doctor, driving his parents' white Cadillac between Los Angeles and Phoenix, Arizona. He picks up a young girl wanting a lift. After a girl resembling the one whom Dr Densmore gave the lift has been found dead, Detective Venner questions the hero. "We got a tip," he says. "Right after that report went out on the radio. This guy says a nigger doctor driving a big white Cadillac brought Bonnie Lee to Phoenix." Hughes did not mention before that Dr Densmore was black, and now the reader understands that his situation and earlier small paranoid attitudes has much to do with racial issues. Geoffrey O'Brien has written in Hardboiled America (1997) about Hughes's work: "But lyricism they had, these novels, with their rain and shadow and Park Avenue and Madison Avenue suddenly places of fear, and with their sudden eruptions of dream material into an orderly salon (the poet's legacy). Maybe no one will ever be frightened by her books again, but they will perhaps be remained of a surrounding world - the one she wrote in - far more frightening than her own childlike, sometimes magical, adventures." Her series character was Inspector Tobin.

Hughes also wrote Erle Stanley Gardner: the Case of the Real Perry Mason (1978).

Mike Grost on Dorothy B Hughes

Dorothy B. Hughes' novella "The Spotted Pup" (1945) is full of private eye characters and settings that had been clichés for decades: the lonely private eye with his cheap office, the glamorous heiress looking for a missing man, the sinister night club run by underworld characters - but everything in it seems fresh, new and gripping. How does she achieve this effect? For one thing, her plotting. The story is a genuine mystery tale, in which the hero continuously unravels more and more of the mystery. It is not a series of character sketches, in the manner of Ross MacDonald, but a genuine mystery tale. For another, Hughes often plays surrealistic games with the conventions of the hard-boiled mystery story. The reader is taken back by strange twists and turns in the plot. These surrealist variations are perhaps in the tradition of Craig Rice, who also rang surrealist changes on the underworld story. However, surrealism is such a standard (and powerful) strategy of the classical mystery story, that one is hesitant is ascribing its presence in Hughes to any one source. There is a transformative quality to Hughes' tale, in which ordinary people pass into the underworld, gaining new roles and identities in the process.

"The Spotted Pup" is completely different in style from most of Hughes' books, which are suspense novels with literary pretensions. Most of the characters in it are neither emotionally disturbed nor psychopathic, and no one is psychoanalyzed. The characters are mainly not dysfunctional, unlike those of Hughes' novels. The hero of "The Spotted Pup" is especially supposed to represent a normal, decent man. Hughes' ideas of normality are surprisingly conventional. They extend to her hero keeping his business shoes shined, but not to a high gloss; such an extreme polish would apparently indicate that he is not a proper Organization Man of the era! Her hero is a genuinely nice person, but he is certainly no non-conformist. He is part of a trend in post war crime fiction to idolize bourgeois normality. For a nation that had just been through the Depression and W.W. II, such normality understandably seemed like a price beyond rubies.

While the tone of the novella is serious, it is vastly more light hearted than Hughes' suspense work. It is written as if she were taking a vacation from her "literary" fiction by grinding out a Hammett pastiche. It is just a minor footnote in mystery history, but it is fun, especially in its first half, where its plotting is richest. "The Spotted Pup" (1945) is one of three novellas Hughes wrote during 1945 - 1946 for Mystery Book, an atypical digest size magazine. Each issue's sole contents were two or three crime novellas. Their authors ranged from Golden Age novelists such as Margery Allingham, to private eye authors like Brett Halliday and Kurt Steel. A few pulp writers contributed, such as Cornell Woolrich, but most were writers of mystery books and for the slicks: for example, Anthony Boucher contributed what seems to be the only Sister Ursula novella, "Vacancy with Corpse" (1946). Hughes did publish a few detective stories in the pulps, and later her 1978 authorized biography of Erle Stanley Gardner; these associate her to a degree with the pulp tradition.

Bibliography

The So Blue Marble (1940)

The Cross-Eyed Bear (1940)

The Bamboo Blonde (1941)

The Fallen Sparrow (1942)

The Blackbirder (1943)

The Delicate Ape (1944)

Johnnie (1944)

Dread Journey (1945)

Ride the Pink Horse (1946)

The Scarlet Imperial aka Kiss For A Killer (1946)

In A Lonely Place (1947)

The Candy Kid (1950)

The Davidian Report (1952) aka The Body on the Bench

The Expendable Man (1963)