73. Dorothy B. Hughes — The Expendable Man
KIM: Hi, everyone! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew…
AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes. And it’s just us today.
KIM: Yes, a rare full-length episode with no guest. Don’t worry, we have plenty more amazing scholars and writers joining us in the weeks and months to come.
AMY: That’s right, but for the book we’re discussing today, I dunno. It made me a little wary of strangers.
KIM: No joke!
AMY: We’ll explain in a minute, but suffice to say, Dorothy B. Hughes’ crime/noir novel The Expendable Man is a psychological thriller that will have you on the edge of your seat and maybe even questioning your own instincts.
KIM: It’s an incredible “whodunit” with an unusual twist — but rest assured, we don’t want to give anything away in this episode, so we’re going to be purposefully vague when discussing parts of this novel.
AMY: That’s right. We want to preserve your own personal experience of reading this book. But because the pivotal twist Kim just mentioned is so ripe for discussion, there will be a point at the very end of this episode when we’ll give you an opportunity to hit stop on this recording. Then if you want to hear more (or maybe read the book and return for this final part of the discussion) you are welcome to continue listening.
KIM: We’re maintaining an air of mystery on this podcast, which is fitting for this book! So let’s raid the stacks and get started!
[Intro music]
AMY: So in addition to being a literary critic and historian, today’s featured author, Dorothy B. Hughes, wrote 14 crime and detective novels, many in the noir-style that Kim, I know you love.
KIM: [responds about your love for noir.]
AMY: I’ve never been as much into that sort of macho, gritty hard-boiled stuff. Even mysteries in general… I usually have to be cajoled into reading them.
KIM: I know, which is interesting because you’re so into true crime! So that surprises me.
AMY: Yeah, I’m not sure how to dissect that. But I was interested in reading today’s book because you recommended it. And also because I’m not as used to noir-crime novels written by women, so that intrigued me. This book was published in 1963, and while of course today there are a lot of women crime and detective novelists, it’s not as easy to name classic women noir writers the same way we talk about Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
KIM: [Responds about how Hughes really deserves to be listed alongside those names — especially since three of her best-known novels were adapted into Hollywood films (one of which starred Humphrey Bogart.) I mean come on!
AMY: Yes we’ll get into all that later, but first, Kim, what do we know about Dorothy B. Hughes?
KIM: She was born Dorothy Bell Flanagan in Kansas City, Missouri in 1904. (Her mother’s maiden name was Callahan, so she sounds pretty solidly of Irish descent.) We could not find much about her early years growing up in Missouri other than the fact that she knew from a very young age that she wanted to be a writer. She received a journalism degree from the University of Missouri and then took some graduate coursework at Columbia University. Her first published book was actually a book of poetry called Dark Certainty, which won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1931. She worked as a journalist and eventually found herself in Albuquerque, New Mexico taking more graduate classes at the University of New Mexico. Around this time, in 1932, she married a man named Levi Allan Hughes who was the son of a prominent Santa Fe businessman. They moved into a pretty impressive residence with a tennis court that took up almost an entire block. Her marriage seems to have been a happy one.
AMY: In 1939, Hughes wrote a nonfiction book about the history of the University of New Mexico. Meanwhile, she’d given birth to three children (a son and two daughters) by the time her first novel, The So Blue Marble, was published in 1940. And over the next seven years she published 11 crime/thriller/noir-style books, several of which feature Santa Fe as the backdrop. She was able to churn them out, and it seems like the public ate them up.
KIM: Wow! To be writing this prolifically with three small children? How? I mean, even if she was living a somewhat privileged lifestyle (it sounds like), that’s really impressive.
AMY: Apparently she would write at night after all the kids were in bed. I found a 2016 article in the Santa Fe New Mexican about Hughes in which her youngest daughter, Suzy, had this recollection about her mom: “You did not go into her room when she was writing. She wrote in her bedroom laying in bed, and you had to knock on the door, and if she was busy, you couldn’t go in. She would just not answer.”
KIM: [responds. Maybe something like “The Mystery of the Mom Behind the Closed Door.” I love it. ]
AMY: Incidentally, Dorothy’s sister, Calla, was also a writer. She had moved to Santa Fe in 1929 (I wonder if maybe that’s what prompted Dorothy to move there? Or if it was the other way around?) But her sister actually was the society page editor for The New Mexican newspaper under her married name, Calla Hay. Seems like she was something of a local celebrity. Later, Calla and Dorothy also both moved their families to Los Angeles in the 1940s to write for Hollywood.
KIM: Okay, yes, let’s get into that. So in 1943, Hughes’ novel The Fallen Sparrow hit the silver screen. (That starred a young Maureen O’Hara) Then in 1947, Universal Studios adapted Hughes’ very popular novel, Ride the Pink Horse. (Sounds like a funny title, but the pink horse refers to a famous little antique ‘flying jenny’ carousel in Taos, New Mexico.)
AMY: Side note: we should do a mini episode on carousels… I mean, we live close to the one and only carousel that actually inspired Walt Disney to create DisneyLand, right?
KIM: Yep. But I love the idea of a carousel inspiring a noir novel, too. There’s something a bit eerie about that calliope music, right?
AMY: Yeah, I haven’t read that book, but I think the carousel factors into it in a sort of sweet, poignant moment in the book.
KIM: Okay, good to know.
AMY: Anyway, while living and working in Hollywood, a friend invited her to the set of the Ingrid Bergman movie Spellbound. Bergman met Hughes and then tipped off her pal Humphrey Bogart about her. This led Bogart to buy the film rights to Hughes’ 1947 L.A.-noir novel, In a Lonely Place for his production company, Santana Productions. He stars in the movie. It’s apparently both an amazing novel and film. (Many critics maintain that this movie, though lesser known, is actually Bogart’s finest work and it’s considered one of the best film noirs of all time.) It subverts the gender cliches of the genre — we won’t say anything else about it to prevent spoilers.
KIM: [can respond with your thoughts on film/book.]
AMY: Also, according to Wikipedia, there’s a Smithereens song called “In a Lonely Place” which quotes dialogue from the film, so I’m wondering if that same dialogue was in Hughes’ original novel.
KIM: Hmm, I’ll have to go back and check. But anyway, after her spell in Hollywood, Hughes moved back to New Mexico in the early 1960s and by this time she’d taken a break from writing crime novels — she said she needed to focus on her ailing mother and to help out with caring for her grandchildren. She did, however, still review books for various newspapers — she was a book critic for 40 years. But she wrote one last novel, in 1963. It’s the book we’re discussing today, The Expendable Man, which was reissued in 2012 by New York Review Books. Shall we dive into it?
AMY: Yes! Walter Mosely actually wrote the afterward to the book, saying: “She was among the best and her work belongs in our canon of classic American stories. Bringing her back is no act of nostalgia; it is a gateway through which we might access her particular view of that road between our glittering versions of American life and the darker reality that waits at the end of the ride.”
KIM: And that’s a perfect segue to the set-up for this novel, right? The story begins on the road. A young doctor by the name of Hugh Denismore is alone, driving his mother’s Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix to attend his niece’s wedding. (His parents will be meeting up in Phoenix separately.) He pulls through a town and a beat-up car filled with teenagers crosses his path — their raucous laughter and screaming leave him unnerved. He stops at a drive-in restaurant for a quick bite. Once he’s back on the road, he encounters a hitchhiker in the middle of nowhere. It’s a teenage girl.
AMY: Don’t do it, Hugh! Don’t stop to pick her up!
KIM: Right? But it’s evening now. Hugh’s a good guy and his conscience won’t let him leave a stranded young woman by herself in the middle of nowhere. The moment he pulls over, though, a sense of dread starts to plague Hugh. Amy, do you want to read a passage from this moment?
AMY: Sure. So this is when the young doctor has just asked the girl, against his better judgment but wanting to be a good Samaritan, if she wants a ride. Hughes writes: “He repeated his question, a little impatiently because he didn’t like this situation at all, his car stopped here on the road, the girl standing outside looking at him. At any moment a car from Indio might overtake them, or one appear from the eastern crest of the road. A chill sense of apprehension came on him and he wished to hell he hadn’t stopped. This could be the initial step in some kind of shakedown, although how, with nothing or no one in sight for unlimited miles, he couldn’t figure.
He spoke up more sharply than was his wont. “Well, do you want a ride or don’t you?”
“I guess so.” As if in speaking she’d made her decision, she’d opened the door and piled in.
He set the car in motion again, picking up speed until he hit the sixty-five-mile maximum for this highway. He didn’t look at her or say anything more to her. From the periphery of his eye, he saw her set her traveling bag on the floor mat, away from him, close to the door. Her soiled sandal touched it protectively, as if it were filled with gold and precious gems. For no particular reason, he was relieved that his suitcases and his medical bag were locked in the trunk of the car.
Far ahead on the road, he saw the shape of an oncoming car as it lifted itself over a culvert. He switched on his lights. The sky was still pale, the pale lavender of twilight, but the sand world had darkened. It was difficult enough to drive at this hour, the lights would identify the presence of his car to the one approaching. When the other car passed his, headed toward Indio, he saw it was yet another jalopy filled with kids. It was hopped up; it zoomed by, with only scraps of voices shrilling above the sound of the motor.
In his rear-view mirror, he watched until it disappeared in the distance. Just for a moment, he had known fear. It might have been the same group which had hectored him in town. The trap might be sperung by his picking up the girl; they might swing about and come after him. Only when the car had disappeared from sight, did he relax and immediately feel the fool. It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumedly educated, civilized man.
KIM: Okay, so Hugh tries to break the ice with his passenger and we can tell that despite her youth (Hugh guesses she’s around 15) she’s bad news. She’s unrefined, brash and a bit bratty. She says her name is Iris Croom.
AMY: If anybody listening watches Ozark, I totally was reminded of the character of Ruth from that show. Manipulative and tricky. And a liar.
KIM: Hugh senses this straight away, so his top priority is to send Iris off on her way, asap. Unfortunately, ridding himself of the girl en route to Phoenix proves difficult. Each time he tries to drop her off in a safe place, near a bus terminal or what have you, she manages to turn up again.
AMY: Like a bad penny.
KIM: Exactly. It’s like in a horror movie when a character’s looking in the mirror and suddenly the reflection of the monster appears in the background. What started off as a sort of cool dread eventually turns into out-and-out panic for Hugh. Iris hasn’t really done anything other than be a typically annoying teenager, but Hugh is increasingly unnerved at being in this girl’s presence. As the reader, you feel his dread, but at the same time, his panic seems maybe a bit of an over-reaction.
AMY: Yeah, like why is he so jumpy?
KIM: I mean, I get it, though, if only because Hughes does such an amazing job of building this slow tension throughout their car ride.
AMY: Absolutely. Once they finally make it to Phoenix, Hugh takes his leave of Iris, but she manages to track him down at his hotel on his first night in town, wherein she makes a request that he flat-out refuses. So she leaves in a huff, and at this point he thinks (and hopes) he’s seen the last of her. He can finally focus on enjoying the wedding festivities.(He’s wrong, though. Dead wrong.) Kim, I absolutely love that Dorothy Hughes sets all the events of this book in the midst of the niece’s wedding and surrounding social events. Hugh’s family is totally clueless that he picked up a hitchhiker coming into town or that he might be in any danger. They’re just ready to celebrate the happy occasion!
KIM: Yes, and it forces Hugh, in the midst of all these family events, to try to keep his shit together and plaster on a smile even as the situation continues to devolve over the course of the weekend. Hughes writes: “During the reception, he couldn’t remain on guard. He had to mingle with family and friends. With his fingers crossed against intrusion, he had to pretend the joy the others were feeling. Grandmother’s towering white cake was cut, the toasts lifted. Hugh limited himself to one champagne cup. He would take no chances on a muddle head tonight.”
KIM: As if family events aren’t stressful enough!
AMY: To me, the wedding stuff….that’s the sort of unique spin a female writer can put on a story like this. It’s not just set in back alleys and seedy bars and dark stairwells, which is what I think of from the male noir writers. There’s something inherently feminine in the family and wedding stuff that I enjoyed. And yes, as you said, it makes an already tense-situation a thousand times more difficult for poor Hugh, especially since one of the wedding guests — a friend of the bride — has captured his fancy and the feeling is very mutual.
KIM: Oooh, yes, let’s talk about Ellen Hamilton!
AMY: Ellen! She and Hugh flirt at the rehearsal dinner — the chemistry is real, and the family are all cheering this couple on from the sidelines — they’d been hoping these two would hit it off.
KIM: But given Hugh’s difficulties which stem from his car ride from Los Angeles, Ellen gets caught up in the trouble, too. They become a team as they try to figure out a way to get Hugh untangled from the mess he’s in.
AMY: Yes, and again, listeners, nothing we’re revealing here is really a spoiler. I will say of Ellen, though… she’s great, but for me, she’s almost too supportive when she finds out what a pickle this guy is in. I kept wishing for a moment where she’d at least have a moment of doubt or say to herself, “Do I really want to take all this on? For a guy I literally just met?”
KIM: Well, at least Hugh is thinking it the whole time, even if she’s not saying it. He knows he shouldn’t be saddling her with this.
AMY: Yes, Dorothy Hughes writes: “He was falling in love with her as he’d never known love before, even with full realization of the hopelessness of the situation. Because of a moment of charity on a desert road, he would have to live with the taint of this case forever. That was the cold truth. He could never sully an Ellen Hamilton with its ugliness.”
KIM: We’ll be talking about Ellen more at the tail end of this episode, because I think her willingness to help him makes a lot more sense when viewed within the full context of this book (which we aren’t going to reveal here.) Also, we should mention that the weekend is hot and muggy. That stifling heat also felt very appropriate for a noir novel. The atmosphere is suitably oppressive.
AMY: Right. And as we stated at the top of the episode, there’s a twist to this book. Hughes powerfully upends this story with just a single word — it happens on page 55 of the book and we won’t say what that word is. We’ll leave it for you to discover. But as soon as you read it, you’re like, “Ohhhhhhh.” Kim, you had told me that there was going to be a twist, but I still didn’t see this coming.
KIM: Yeah, you kept texting me trying to guess what it was and I was like, “You really just need to keep reading.”
AMY: Needless to say, I think that moment (in my experience with it, anyway) kind of forced me to acknowledge my own culpability, as a reader, in some respects.
KIM: [responds without really giving anything away…something about having preconceived notions that are entirely wrong] So that’s all we’ll say about The Expendable Man in this portion of the podcast. Before we move on, we should mention that later in her career, in 1978, Dorothy Hughes also wrote a biography of Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote the Perry Mason detective stories. Hughes also won several other writing awards in her lifetime. In 1951 she received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for criticism and in 1978 she was honored with the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. She passed away in 1993 and her ashes were interred in Santa Fe’s Rosario Cemetery.
AMY: Yes, and I want to credit Molly Boyle, whose 2016 newspaper profile of Hughes in The New Mexican helped fill in some of the blanks for us about her life. The University of New Mexico actually has in its archives an oral history interview with Hughes about her life, but those tapes are not transcribed, sadly, so short of flying to New Mexico we had to cobble together what we could about her personal life. Her three children are no longer living, but if there’s anybody out there who has other insights to share with us about Hughes’ life, please let us know.
KIM: Absolutely. And now, I think, would be a good time for all of you who have not yet read The Expendable Man to hit stop on this recording unless you want to have the plot and that special twist we mentioned revealed. So we’ll five you a few seconds here to fumble around for your phone and make sure you can sign off.
AMY: Fumble, fumble, fumble… I feel like we need a little interlude music. [Hums the end of the Jeopardy theme.]
KIM: Okay, hopefully everyone who wanted to jump off the podcast has done so by now. And to all of you sticking around, I feel like we are in a special secret society.
AMY: And now we can finally speak freely about this book! Although we can’t say the word that turns this book on it’s head on page 55.
KIM: Right, because it’s a racial slur. The n-word. Those six letters clue us in to the fact that this story is more nuanced and more complicated than we had anticipated. Amy, what was your initial reaction when you got to this page and saw that word?
AMY: It felt like a little jolt, honestly. I was like, “Wait, Hugh’s black?” Then I literally flipped back to some of the beginning pages wondering if I should have known it all along; if it had been mentioned already. But no, this was the first reference to the young doctor’s race. I had just assumed, unthinkingly, that Hugh was white. Hughes plays on all of these stereotypes that would lead us to that default mode. He’s a young doctor. He’s well-spoken, well-educated (he quotes Longfellow in his car ride with Iris). He comes from a well-off family of white-collar professionals. I shouldn’t have automatically assumed “white guy,” but I did.
KIM: And yet when you go back to the intro of the book, Hughes has left the reader so many signs. The teenagers in that jalopy weren’t just being crazy kids — they were screaming racial slurs at him (she just didn’t specify it.) When he pulls his car into the drive-in eater, Hughes writes that he “waited for one of the serving girls to bring him a menu” …. “Eventually, as he knew eventually it would happen, the less pretty of the young waitresses came to his car and thrust a menu at him.”
AMY: Reading that now, knowing he’s black, you’re like, “Oh, he was purposefully made to wait… she delivered the menus to him rudely.” But the first time around, you don’t even think twice about it. Hughes is being sneaky with how she subtly reveals it. Later when Iris has gotten into the car, Hugh tells her he’s a doctor. Hughes writes that her reply is: “‘Really?’ She stretched the word, like a credulous child.” After the fact, we understand this sarcastic reaction.
KIM: Right and in that passage you read earlier where she moves her bags possessively toward her side of the car… you are now reading that in a new light, too. Everything suddenly takes on these racist undertones.
AMY: And it’s not helped by the fact that once he gets to Phoenix, Hugh has some racist cops eyeing him for Iris’s murder. He has to grit his teeth and try to be as accommodating and as civil as he can be, despite their disgusting attitude. But basically he knows that as a black man, he is guilty until proven innocent, not the other way around. It also explains why he is not so forthcoming when he first finds out that Iris (a.k.a. Bonnie Crumb) was murdered. As a reader, you think, “Just come clean right away that you gave her the ride!” But you understand why he didn’t once his race becomes apparent. He needs to consider his options very carefully knowing he will be judged by an entirely different set of standards and a different brand of justice.
KIM: Yes, and Ellen knows that too. (We realize that Ellen, too, is black, and I think that’s why she’s so willing to believe this guy she just met. She knows how often Black men are wrongly accused and made scapegoats, so she is quick to believe in his innocence. Hugh knows that nobody in law enforcement is going to believe him, so he’s going to have to uncover his own proof.
AMY: Although there is the white lawyer, Skye, who is on Hugh’s side. And he becomes the third point in a very minor love triangle with Hugh and Ellen as well. (They realize they will need a white lawyer because only a white man believing in his innocence will help them — that’s a sad commentary in its own right.)
KIM: Once we realize that Hugh is a black man, Dorothy Hughes doesn’t shy away from showing us the subtle and not-so-subtle indignities that both he (and Ellen) have to face. The hotel staff in the novel are pretty overtly racist, and the couple even talks about whether it’s okay to swim in the pool there.
AMY: Yes, all these moments are profoundly disturbing and yet Ellen and Hugh sort of take it in stride. They’re so used to it. At one point, the racist cop pays Hugh a visit at his grandmother’s house. When he enters the house he says something like, “I’ve always been curious as to how you folks live,” and when he’s leaving he even dramatically takes a big whiff of air as he’s leaving the house and remarks, “Fresh air sure smells good.”
KIM: [responds about these upsetting moments]. Going back to our own reaction to the beginning of this book and our just assuming that Hugh was a white character, it would be interesting, I think, to find out how Black readers (or any other minority) would respond. Would they have been roped in as easily as white readers? Or do those stereotypes that Hughes employs not fool them as easily?
AMY: And also, what do we think of a white woman of privilege writing this black man’s story in the 1960s?
KIM: Well, getting back to the afterword that Walter Mosley wrote for the New York Review Books reissue, he says: “A white woman writing of a young black man’s problems with the law was certainly a kind of gamble — but Hughes often chose to write from perspectives far from her own” … and he also says, “The poison this too-little heralded writer uncovers is as lethal as arsenic. Hughes’s hero wants to believe in the country Los Angeles represents to him. He wants to believe that his education and his family’s hard-won social position will protect him.”
AMY: Right, it’s like there are two threats running through this novel. There’s an immediate danger (the killer on-the-lam) and an existential one which is the societal threat faced by people of color. I was just as afraid for Hugh each time he had to walk into that police station as I was when he was driving down dark lanes looking for the real killer. You have to credit Hughes for exposing racism in her novel at the time she did. It was gutsy.
KIM: Absolutely. And it definitely taught you and I a lesson about being a more critical reader going forward and not jumping to conclusions so quickly.
AMY: So that’s all for today’s episode. If you enjoyed it, be sure to let us know by leaving us a five-star review wherever you listen to this podcast. We’ll be back next with another mini episode — and we’ve got plenty more amazing guests lined up for the next few months to talk about women authors you’ve likely never read before.
KIM: Bye, everyone!
AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.