© 2007 William Ahearn
Nicholas Ray’s “In a Lonely Place” (1950) is one of many films described as noir that has me totally baffled as to why. The film is the story of a violent and angry hack Hollywood scriptwriter – Dix Steele – who hires a hatcheck girl at a nightclub to tell him the story of the novel he’s been hired to adapt for the screen. The hatcheck girl is murdered after leaving Dix’s apartment and the police seem to think that Dix Steele (played by Humphrey Bogart in one of his best performances) did it.
The audience knows that Dix didn’t kill the girl and even Dix’s old air force buddy, Brub – now a homicide detective – doesn’t believe it. Coming to Dix’s aid is his neighbor, the beautiful Laurel Gray (played by Gloria Graham). The story is basically one of a self-destructive creative who brutalizes people almost out of habit. This isn’t a Hitchcock flick. This innocent man isn’t innocent and isn’t really even likeable.
In the end, he loses the love of Laurel, writes a great script and is cleared of the murder. It’s a nice flick and a favorite among the Nicholas Ray cult but there is nothing noir about it other than it being a somewhat dark story.
Dorothy B. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place is an entirely different story. This is such a wonderful book that I didn’t mind missing the subway that was just leaving the station on my way home from work so that I could spend another ten or so minutes with it. For a while, I avoided Hughes’ most famous book because while the film was interesting, the story inside the film wasn’t something that I wanted to read. By now I should know better and the book is one of the best roman noir novels out there.
For starters, Dorothy B. Hughes is an excellent writer: Solid, unrelenting, never over the top prose that tells a sordid and dark tale of a rapist and serial killer. That Dix Steele is a rapist and serial killer is not a spoiler, the reader knows it from the beginning of the narrative. In the book, Dix Steele isn’t a scriptwriter. He’s a liar and a phony that tells everyone that he’s writing a novel. The apartment he lives in, the car he drives, the clothes he wears all belong to an acquaintance that he probably killed.
The book was written long before sagas of serial killers became standard book fare. Not one of the rapes or murders is visualized in the text and whether that was Hughes’ choice or the demands of the times – it was published in 1947 – is somewhat irrelevant. The device is unsettling because the text focuses on the lesser crimes and as an exploration of character it is riveting. One of the interesting aspects of the narrative is that no cause for Dix Steele’s sexual and homicidal rage is supposed in the text. There’s no mention of some neurotic mother or warped religious upbringing that trivializes so many other books about serial killers.
Dorothy B. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place is what people should mean when they say noir. This is a really excellent book and I hated bringing it back to the library.