Atmospheric Noir Thriller

This had me captivated from start to finish. The narration is superb and the novel is pure noir. Highly recommended.

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Atmospheric, slow-moving, hypnotic

I found In a Lonely Place powerful and unsettling, and have always loved noir set in the 40s, but had only read one Hughes, so gave this a try. For me, it started slowly, and unfolded even more slowly. But, like the main character, surrounded by revellers while he goes about his dark and solitary business, I found myself trapped in the surreal fiesta town in which the book is set, entranced by Hughes's evocative writing and, it must be said, by the resonant, deep, initially hard to adjust to, but after a short while, compelling narrator's voice.

The voice of the narrator is so muscular and vibrant it initially threatened to distract from Hughes's mood-setting, but I soon found the actor's voice as compelling as the writing. There is something of Steinbeck in her sympathetic writing of Mexican paisanos and there are echos of Hemingway in her style sometimes, not surprising, perhaps, given she was writing this in 1946, I think.

Her use of the same word twice in succeeding sentences, or even in the same sentence, for example, which initially jarred a bit but I grew to accept and then expect and even find oddly comforting in the repetition.

The protagonist, Sailor's, view of his own mission as an inevitably successful one is so at odds with his apparent incompetence - unable even to find a hotel bed and having to sleep out in the park - that there is some comedy layered into the tragic.

The good cop, Mac, whose choice of clothes is intended to make him blend in and not be noticed - bobbly hat and waste sash, which all the fiesta goers dress up in, but not Sailor - seems blissfully unaware of the comic effect of the hat on Sailor, who grew up with him on the rough side of Chicago. And the Pancho character is richly comic as well as providing a trouble-free alien puzzle to Sailor's troubled central character.

But the lightness of the comic touches is just the odd swirl of cream in an otherwise noir mood - as you'd expect - of the whole. The motif of Sailor's right hand being always clamped on the gun in his pocket throughout the book wore a little thin for me, but did add tension, particularly to some of the periods of longueurs when he is tramping around and the story's wheels seem to be spinning.

Loneliness, solitude, being an outsider - as in her more famous book, In a Lonely Place - is the fate of the transgressor at the centre of her stories. Sailor's occasional panic attacks at his lack of connection to anyone or anything around him bring this to the fore. Hughes writes literary noir, rather than pulp noir. She was a fine and under-rated writer.

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6 people found this helpful