Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“It’s harder to come back than it is to arrive”

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes

by 1 Comment

CBR Bingo Square: Violence Maddeningly, I now don’t know what put Dorothy Hughes’s 1947 noir In a Lonely Place on my radar. (I thought it was Susan Straight’s 1001-book literary map of America, but…apparently not?) All I know is that I am a sucker for A) mystery novels, and B) novels about my home state, and what reliably ticks both boxes? Noir. And Dorothy Hughes was a new discovery for me, which made this novel all the more appealing. Also, deliciously, In a Lonely Place isn’t a […]

Ride the Pink Horse – Dorothy Hughes (1946)

Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy Hughes

by Leave a Comment

This is a book offered up for free by the new Audible Plus service, and that’s probably mostly why I listened to it. I’ve read Dorothy Hughes’s much more famous novel In a Lonely Place, which is a pretty bleak and dreary novel too (and this is as well), but it also holds up a little better than this one. We meet Sailor, a kind of cast away character who shows up in a town hosting a Spanish festival. He, of course, makes the mistakes […]

The Star On the Train

Dread Journey by Dorothy Hughes

by Leave a Comment

I enjoyed Gone Girl well enough but those hailing Gone Girl and the female-written female-driven thriller novel that has become en vogue should do a little cultural excavation. Women have historically dominated the thriller market, especially in the 30s through the 50s. And one of the greats, indeed perhaps the greatest of these was Dorothy Hughes. I haven’t read a lot of Hughes and that’s my mistake. Her most popular work is In A Lonely Place, which inspired the Humphrey Bogart movie that’s drastically different from the book. But she’s […]

Get Out

The Expendable Man by Dorothy Hughes

by Leave a Comment

I need a valium after reading this. I’ve written in this space before and in other places about my concern when white authors write from the perspective of non-white characters. Obviously, people writing trans-racially is not uncommon, nor is it necessarily a bad thing. Many great works of literature would be lost without folks doing this. And yet, considering the strong power dynamics of white supremacy in the United States (and frankly, the globe), a more natural distance separates colonizer from the colonized, no matter […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo