Dorothy B. Hughes (1904–1993) was an American mystery writer and
critic. Born Dorothy Belle Flanagan in Kansas City, Missouri, she
received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the
University of Missouri and worked as a reporter before attending
graduate school at the University of New Mexico and Columbia
University. In 1931 her collection of poetry, Dark Certainty, was
selected for inclusion in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The
next year she got married and it was not until 1940 that she
published the first of her fourteen mystery novels, The So Blue
Marble. For four decades Hughes was the crime-fiction reviewer for
The Albuquerque Tribune, earning an Edgar Award for Outstanding
Mystery Criticism from the Mystery Writers of America in 1950. The
Expendable Man, published in 1963, was her last novel. “I simply
hadn’t the tranquility required to write” while caring for her
family, she later said. In 1978, however, she published The Case of
the Real Perry Mason, a critical biography of Erle Stanley Gardner,
and that same year she was recognized as a Grand Master by
the Mystery Writers of America. Among Hughes’s best-known books are
The Cross-Eyed Bear, Ride the Pink Horse, and In a Lonely Place
(which was made into a movie directed by Nicholas Ray and starring
Humphrey Bogart).
Walter Mosley is the author of more than thirty-four books,
including the best-selling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins.
Among the many honors he has received are an O. Henry Award, a
Grammy, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
“The Expendable Man is one of the great trick novels of crime
fiction. Yet to call it that is to belittle it. Its trick is no
clever, superimposed bit of literary legerdemain: it is integral to
the whole conception of the book. . . . A fine achievement.”
—H. R. F. Keating, Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books
“Hughes didn’t just pre-date Jim Thompson, she also pre-dated
Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell, and other so-called Masters of
Psychological Suspense or Noir. And her writing style stands up to
the test of time.” —Sarah Weinman, Bookslut
"Puts Chandler to shame . . . Hughes is the master we keep turning
to."—Sara Paretsky, author of the V. I. Warshawski novels
“You are rocked back by Ms. Hughes some fifty pages into
her story, and I can certify that the effect is truly rocking.
You even read past the vital word, just one word in a sentence
of swift
dialogue, before you realize what it has said, and what a
new and different light it casts on everything you have read
up to that moment.” —H. R. F Keating
“A mystery writer who. . . in America was regarded as one
of the great names of detective fiction. . . . Her real talent
lay in an ability to create atmospheres of growing
apprehension and
fear, a very modern approach at a time when Agatha
Christie was producing her comparatively predictable puzzles.
. . . Her last, and some consider her best, work of fiction
was The
Expendable Man.” —The Times (London)
“Let me say that it is Mrs. Hughes’ finest work . . . of unusual
stature both as a suspense story and as a straight novel and nowise
to be missed.” —Anthony Boucher, The New York Times
“The suspense twist makes this tale a stand-out.” —Saturday
Review
“To read The Expendable Man today is to experience a mature work by
a mistress of her craft.” —Dominic Power
"A surprise-twist gasper about a young doc who picks up a sick
chick and gets framed by a hack dick for her kill" —Time
“One of crime fiction's finest writers of psychological suspense.”
—Marcia Miller, author of the Sharon McCone novels
"This lady is the queen of noir. . ." —Laurie R. King, author of
the Mary Russell novels
“Nobody but Dorothy Hughes can cast suspense into such an uncanny
spell . . .” —San Francisco Chronicle
"A gun molling wordslinger who took it to the tough guys . . . I
simply call Hughes one damn good story teller." —John Hood, Bully
Magazine
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