In a Lonely Place: A 70-year Old Noir Novel for the #MeToo Moment

“He scraped through the damp sand to the center house, two stories, both pouring broad bands of light into the fog. There was warmth and gaiety within, through the downstairs window he could see young people gathered around a piano, their singing mocking the forces abroad on this cruel night. She was there, protected by happiness and song and the good. He was separated from her only by a sand yard and a dark fence, by a lighted window and by her protectors. He stood there until he was trembling with pity and rage” (170).

Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1947 novel In a Lonely Place was re-published in 2003 by CUNY’s Feminist Press as part of its Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp series. Though narrated in third person, the perspective comes from within the head of Dix Steele, a lay-about WWII vet with a vicious sense of entitlement--to the material things he thinks he should be able to possess without working and to the women he believes he should possess without their consent. It is his deep sense of being owed something that feeds his need to rape and kill. There is a police investigation of the murders of young women in L.A., with Dix’s good friend from the war in the role of a chief investigator. But, because we only see what Dix sees, know what he knows, and access his thoughts—and he is highly enamored of himself and his ability to avoid being caught—it is hard to tell when exactly the police are on to him. So, this novel does not function like a police procedural, where we see for ourselves what the investigators are doing and thinking. In this case, the gaze onto the cops, and everyone else, is Dix’s, not ours.

While this can be disconcerting and uncomfortable and enraging in turn, there is an art and a purpose to the author’s method. Hughes--as the blurb on the back cover states--“peels the layers off American masculinity and stunningly undoes the conventional noir plot.” (And, I would add to this assessment that it is American white masculinity on which she focuses her laser. Though race never explicitly enters into the novel, it doesn’t have to, for everyone in it is white, and the attitudes that ooze out of Dix’s pores are those of white supremacy as well as male supremacy.) She also revises the femme fatale in significant, important ways, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say more about that except to urge you to read for some very cool kick-assery on the part of a couple of the female characters.

Every so often, some writer or film maker or painter or activist will do this peeling back and revealing as part of her or his work. Sometimes, whole groups in a community or in the country will speak or march or organize or create hashtags for social media as part of this work, to point to what is both obvious and also pushed below the surface. It is happening again, which is what makes the book feel even more relevant now than when CUNY decided to re-publish it.

I read this novel in early 2018, in the midst of #MeToo, in the context of so many women speaking out about sexual harassment and assault, of numerous powerful men losing their positions as a result of the entitlement they clearly feel: entitled to disparage women, to propose sex in exchange for some work-related favor, to masturbate in front of women, to “grab them by the pussy,” to force their hands into girls’ vaginas under the guise of medical treatment. In this context, a pulp novel that “peels layers off American masculinity,” that lays out how misogyny works in a fictional character can mean something different than it meant in 1947. This is not to say that Harvey Weinstein, Louis CK, Donald Trump, Larry Nassar, or any of the other men whose hyper-entitled behaviors toward women in their circles have been central to this moment are the same as a serial killer, but the underlying attitudes that lead Dix Steele to the most extreme misogynist behavior are completely related to those of the contemporary men we have had to focus on this past year. All of them are on a misogyny continuum.

While reading In a Lonely Place, we are privy to Dix’s disparaging thoughts about the woman who cleans his apartment, thoughts predominantly stemming from what he deems to be her unattractiveness. All he needs is the 1-10 ranking scale for women, and he’d sound like Donald Trump at numerous times on the campaign trail. Laurel, the woman Dix declares is beautiful and whom he supposedly loves, is—he tells us, with characteristic sexism--“meant to be displayed” (109). Later, when she disappoints him, he resorts to a deeper, yet still not uncommon, misogyny: “There wasn’t any girl worth getting upset over. They were all alike, cheats, liars, whores. Even the pious ones were only waiting for a chance to cheat and lie and whore. He’d proved it, he’d proved it over and over again. There wasn’t a decent one among them” (165). Now that Twitter has doubled its character limit, he would fit right in with a certain category of social media troll with that one. After reading a newspaper account of one of his murder victims, Mildred Atkinson, Dix concludes that “she had led a very stupid life. Grade school, high school—Hollywood High but she was no beauty queen—business college and a job in an insurance office. . . . She played bridge with girlfriends and she once taught a Sunday school class. . . . The only exciting thing that had ever happened to her was to be raped and murdered” (41). No woman’s life, apparently, is worthwhile, unless it has been marked and appropriated by a man.

In her thoughtful Afterword to this Feminist Press reissue, University of Cincinnati professor Lisa Maria Hogeland begins with what she calls “the most difficult question of all: What feminist claims can be made for a novel that is narrated from the perspective of a serial rapist and killer of women?” (225). That question is required when a feminist press reissues a book, she says, and offers a number of answers to the question, including: Hughes doesn’t blame women—a mother, for instance--for Dix’s pathology like so many other works do; she does not in any way blame the victims and their behavior; and through her narration, Hughes takes us inside Dix’s misogyny in order to critique it. This leads to a suggestion by Hughes that “since sexual psychopathy or serial murder can be motivated by so little, there may be little difference between the serial killer (or the rapist, as feminists have long argued) and any other man. The novel is insistent that Dix is—or appears to be—‘normal’” (231). Hogeland then raises the question, “What, then, is the relationship between misogyny in its extreme forms and misogyny in its everyday forms” (231)? It’s all, as I said above, on a continuum.

Her question in 2003 takes me right back to my reading fifteen years later. The misogyny was not new in the 1940s; feminist discussions of it were not new then or in 2003; and, now in 2018, they are renewed. As more men who are just “normal” men—producers, comedians, politicians, doctors, restaurant and mall patrons, all those who led to the everyday, non-famous #MeToo moments of millions of us, fathers, husbands—are pointed at as displaying misogyny, this story, which reveals a misogyny that is both extreme and that which is quotidian, is more interesting than ever.