Toxic masculinity is what one would call the psychogram of Dorothy Hughes’ main character, who 75 years ago gave her the name Dix Steele – a war veteran who craves the “sense of power, excitement and freedom” he has felt during his combat missions during the war. Only on his forays through Los Angeles at night does he feel the intoxication of flying, the thrill. The former fighter pilot preys on women and it doesn’t take much for him to let his propensity for violence run free. He kills out of lust for the hunt, out of a sense of superiority and because he feels threatened by women. For Dix Steele, they are all “cheaters, liars, whores”.
When Steele meets his old friend again, he is not only fascinated by his beautiful wife, but also by his job as a detective, especially since he is working to solve a series of murders of women. Brub Nicolai is a war returnee and survivor like Steele, but as a criminalist he wants to put an end to the killing. A cat-and-mouse game begins, which the author lets the reader follow from Steele’s narrative perspective. However, he does not witness his violent deeds, Hughes rather lets the reader participate in his sick mental world. It is an immersion into the psyche of a misogynist and serial killer, told soberly and uncompromisingly.
Dorothy Hughes – the name of the author, who died in 1993, should be familiar to very few lovers of dark crime literature. The American, born in 1907, wrote 14 novels, as well as an award-winning biography about the writer and “Perry Mason” inventor Erle Stanley Gardner. In 1950, “The Lonely Road” was filmed, starring Humphrey Bogart. Atrium-Verlag has now rediscovered Dorothy Hughes’ original, translated by Gregor Runge. It is a (late) tribute to an author who, as US writer Megan Abbott writes in her afterword, influenced all US writers of psychological detective fiction. The special thing about Hughes’ “The Lonely Way”: Instead of the hardened investigators so typical of “Hardboild” crime novels, she relies on strong female characters. The genre-typical “femme fatale” or well-behaved wife is given new, additional roles. They are the ones who see through the complex Steele – more than unusual heroines in 1947.
A gripping and disturbing crime noir.
Source: Nachrichten
