In a Lonely Place

I don't know if it's because the film noir idiom is so familiar or if lit noir (?) is just naturally cinematic, but I didn't so much read In a Lonely Place as I saw and heard it. Hughes's writing is full of arresting visual and auditory details—the glowing box of a bus on a dark road, the frenzied snapping of hedge clippers—that build a postwar LA so solid you can mentally move around in it. The book is also a glamorous time-capsule of clothes, decor, and turns-of-phrase. But since this is noir written by a woman, the stock characters—a good girl and a bad girl, a cop and a conman—don't stick to the usual script. The suspense starts on the first page and doesn't let up until the last—you know who did it but is he slick enough to pull it off? —Liz
P.S. Completely different and much better than the Humphrey Bogart picture of the same name—and that's no eyewash.