Dorothy B. Hughes
Dorothy B. Hughes (August 10, 1904 May 6, 1993) was an American crime writer, literary critic, and historian. Hughes wrote fourteen crime and detective novels, primarily in the hardboiled and noir styles, and is best known for the novels "In a Lonely Place" (1947) and "Ride the Pink Horse" (1946). Early life. Born Dorothy Belle Flanagan in Kansas City, Missouri, she studied journalism and after graduating from the University of Missouri with a B.J. degree in 1924 worked in that field in Missouri, New Mexico, and New York. She did graduate work in journalism at the University  of New Mexico and at Columbia University without receiving degrees from either institution. Career. Hughes's first published book, "Dark Certainty" (1931), a volume of poetry, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. In 1940, she published her first mystery novel, "The So Blue Marble". She published eight more mystery novels in the 1940s. She also wrote a history of the University of New Mexico and a critical study of writer Erle Stanley Gardner. In 1951 she received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in the category of Outstanding Mystery Criticism, and in 1978 she was  given the MWA's Grand Master award. Hughes acknowledged the influence of such writers as Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and William Faulkner. Her writing style and suspenseful plots exemplify the hardboiled genre of crime and detective novels, and her literary career associates her with other female crime writers of the 1940s and 1950s, such as Margaret Millar, Vera Caspary, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, and Olive Higgins Prouty. In his afterword to a reissue of her last novel, " The Expendable Man" (1963), Walter Mosley wrote that her fiction "captures an unease under the skin of everyday life in a way that is  all her own." Hughes was a successful writer and popular during her day. Three of her novels were made into feature films: "The Fallen Sparrow" (1943), starring John Garfield; "In a Lonely Place" (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart; and "Ride the Pink Horse" (1947), directed by and starring Robert Montgomery, which was remade for television in 1964 as "The Hanged Man". Hughes made her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which she used as the setting of several novels. From 1940 to 1979 she reviewed mysteries for the "Albuquerque Tribune", the "Los Angeles Times", the "New  York Herald-Tribune" and other newspapers. Over the course of her career, she wrote a total of fourteen novels, the majority of which were published between 1940 and 1952. Death. Hughes died on May 6, 1993 in Ashland, Oregon, from complications following a stroke.