The Expendable Man by Dorothy B Hughes
It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumably educated, civilized man. And Hugh Denismore, a young doctor driving his mother's Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix, is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged, would seem to have the world at his feet, even. Then why does the sight of a few redneck teenagers disconcert him? Why is he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the desert highway? And why is he the first person the police suspect when she is found dead in Arizona a few days later? Dorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With The Expendable Man, first published in 1963, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes.
Dorothy B. Hughes (1904-1993) was 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. She was married in 1932 and would not publish her next book, the hard-boiled novel The So Blue Marble, until 1940. Between 1940 and 1952 Hughes published twelve more novels, including The Cross-Eyed Bear and Ride the Pink Horse. For four decades she was the crime-fiction reviewer for The Albuquerque Tribune, earning an Edgar Award for Outstanding Mystery Criticism from the Mystery Writers of America in 1951. The Expendable Man, published in 1963, was her last novel. I simply hadn't the tranquility required to write and care for a 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. Megan Abbott is the author of eight novels, including The Fever, You Will Know Me, and the Edgar Award-winning Queenpin. She is also the author of The Street Was Mine, a study of hard-boiled fiction and film noir and the editor of A Hell of a Woman, a female crime fiction anthology. She received a Ph.D. in literature from New York University.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781903155585 |
| ISBN 10 | 1903155584 |
| Title | The Expendable Man |
| Author | Dorothy B Hughes |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Persephone Books Ltd |
| Year published | 2006-09-22 |
| Number of pages | 344 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |