Saturday, April 15, 2006

In a Lonely Place - Dorothy B. Hughes

Do you remember all those pulp fiction novels - the ones that started mass paperback books? Many of those were written by women. The start of writing each genre of books with a different name. There's a new series of reprints - Femmes Fatales Women Write Pulp, and this is my first experience with it.

I enjoyed Philip Marlowe and this was very much in the same style. A serial killer story, but not like most of the ones they tell today. This was written from the point of view of the killer, nothing new nowadays. The difference was the absence of anything after the killer meet the victim. It would describe the meeting and then he would be returning home. The next day he would read about his crime in the paper. He is friends with one of the detectives working the case, so he has an inside view of how the investigation is going. All in all, it was well done. As good or better than much of what is written today.

I'd read it again. It goes on the shelf and it will be available to borrow.

2 comments:

Kristin said...

That sounds really good. I'm going to have to look into it.

Sarah said...

It's fun to learn about older books. I love Philip Marlowe and pulp fiction in general. Sometimes I try to write paradies of the style. It's fun but difficult to do. Every word matters because of the stucatto (sp? Too lazy to look it up) rhythm. Maybe someday I'll have the patience to do it right!