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In a Lonely Place, by Dorothy B. Hughes, was something of a revelatory find for me. The line of psychological serial killer novels—Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, Thomas Harris’s first couple of Hannibal Lecter books, James Ellroy’s Killer on the Road—they all clearly owe something to the Hughes take on serial killing in this book, which also precisely zeroes in on the killer’s anxieties around women. And it was published in 1947, long before any of the books I mentioned. What led you to select this book, and can you tell us anything more about Hughes?

I adore In a Lonely Place, and arguably it is my favorite crime novel of all time (though the more I say that the less I feel like arguing the point…) It totally bowled me over when I first read it in 2004 (the first time I wrote about the novel was not long after) and each time I’ve reread it, roughly once a year, I find something new to marvel at. But going back to that initial read, I too had never realized the serial killer narrative essentially started with that book, decades before the phrase “serial killer” was even invented. And I wanted to know how Hughes could get us into the mind of a psychopath, make us understand his mindset and be fascinated by it, but also clue the reader in on what was *really* going on around him, and how the women – notably his love interest, Laurel Gray, and the detective’s wife, Sylvia Nicolai – are the real heroes of this story.

Hughes was a fascinating, complex figure. A college graduate who worked as a journalist in New York before winning the Yale Younger Poet Prize (and publishing poems and short stories in The New Yorker!) she married and had children and moved to Albuquerque and Los Angeles, where she found her voice in suspense fiction. Between 1940 and 1947 she published eleven suspense novels, and several others – Dread Journey, Ride the Pink Horse, The Fallen Sparrow – are very, very good. Her output slowed and then she took an 11-year hiatus to concentrate on her children, grandchildren, and caring for an elderly parent, though she still published short stories and reviewed crime fiction for the LA Times and other newspapers. Her last novel, The Expendable Man, is another masterpiece. And after that she never published another novel.