The Queen of Noir gets her due

Marietta Dunn, writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, looks at the Feminist Press’s new line of female pulp fiction writers, specifically the two books by Dorothy B. Hughes

:The Feminist Press has reprinted two of Hughes’ books: The Blackbirder, a story of espionage, set in 1943, during the grimmest days of World War II, and In a Lonely Place, a noir serial-killer novel, written in 1947. These books may be six decades old, but Hughes had an atmospheric writing style and psychological insights that make them seem almost modern.

Though The Blackbirder is told from a woman’s point of view and In a Lonely Place through the eyes of a male murderer, the books share a sense of menace, paranoia, and barely repressed violence that seeps into every paragraph. What they also have in common is women characters who, in the end, are smart and strong and brave in the face of the most horrific dangers. Hughes’ women aren’t scheming hussies, as Cain or Thompson might have written them. They are heroes.

The timing couldn’t be more impeccable, at least from this end, since only yesterday I finished reading THE BLACKBIRDER. While it didn’t grab me as much as IN A LONELY PLACE did (as I wrote about a few months ago) it’s still a sharply written espionage thriller that takes the level of paranoia and mistrust and cranks things up by about a hundred notches. And the heroine, Julie Guille (when she’s not using other aliases) is brave without being showy, strong without being feisty, and keeps her cool in the face of near-insurmountable odds. In other words, like Dunn, I’m hoping the rest of Hughes’ backlist gets reissued–and fast.