Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Don’t Have to Live Like a Refugee

The Blackbirder by Dorothy B. Hughes

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Julie Guille has an unusual background. Daughter of dead American millionaires, she was brought up in France by her aunt and uncle, who manipulated her into giving up control of her inheritance. After the Nazis occupied Paris, Julie discovered her uncle was a collaborator and escaped, taking a priceless diamond necklace to pay her way. Now, she lives illegally in New York, a refugee with no identifying papers and no right to be in the country of her birth. Julie is perpetually looking over her […]

Sylvester Stallone is Not in this Book

The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes

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Dorothy B. Hughes is one of those writer’s writer types that readers get too after they’ve read the noir novels everyone has heard of and are desperate for more. With classics like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse to her name, she is deserving of a place in the upper echelon. The Expendable Man is another plank in that argument. Hugh Densmore is a young doctor driving from L.A. to Phoenix for his sister’s wedding. Phoenix is his hometown, and his whole […]

“And say your mea culpa, which you gradually forgot”

Ride the Pink Horse (1946) by Dorothy B. Hughes

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Cannonball Read 15 Bingo Square “On the Road”: Three men have travelled from Chicago to Santa Fe in a complicated game of cat and mouse I think that Dorothy B. Hughes’s writing, at its best, possesses a terrible beauty, to borrow a phrase from W.B. Yeats’s “Easter, 1916.” Elsewhere, of course, Yeats wrote that “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”, a fragment of a phrase that beats at the dark heart of noir fiction, where comforting myths of love, or integrity, or fairness implode […]

Let the Spinnin’ Wheel Spin

Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy B. Hughes

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Three men from Chicago find themselves in an unnamed New Mexico town for the annual Fiesta, and it’s not by coincidence. Sailor is our flawed protagonist. The product of a rough upbringing, he escaped poverty through the help of Senator Willis Douglas, a corrupt politician. After a falling out, Sailor has tracked the Senator to this out of the way place in hopes of getting paid off for services rendered. The third man is Chief McIntyre of the Chicago police, still looking into the death […]

Psycho Killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est?

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes

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Dorothy B. Hughes was a popular crime writer of the 1940s and 1950s, perhaps the best female crime writer of her day and, based on the prose and psychological complexity on display in this slim volume, very much the equal of her better-known male peers. A very perceptive afterword written by the mystery novelist Megan Abbot does a better job elucidating the feminist aspects of the book than I could hope to, so let me just say that In A Lonely Place is a necessary […]



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