The Fallen Sparrow, published in 1942 and adapted for the screen the following year, was Hughes’s breakout success, and in 1947, In a Lonely Place would cement her place in the pantheon of crime fiction.
Eric Ambler and Graham Greene were her first great inspirations, and in her early novels especially you see their influence, the chiseled sentences and taut moral conundrums spiraling out into near chaos. She trained up as a journalist, bouncing around the country and grad schools while writing poetry on the side, then finally turned to mystery fiction. Hughes was born on August 10th, 1904, in Kansas City, Missouri. Hughes for conjuring up that terrible, ineffable sense of dread, I’ve yet to come across them. If there’s ever been a writer, in crime fiction or any other literature, who surpassed Dorothy B. Maybe it’s just too difficult to capture, difficult to describe, a state of being you know has settled onto you as the pages flip but how it was brought about, nobody can quite say.
Suspense, mystery, and thrills are often celebrated in the annals of crime fiction, but you don’t hear too much about dread.
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