Returning to Backlisted this week are literary agents Becky Brown and Norah Perkins, joint custodians of the Curtis Brown Heritage list of literary estates and previously our guests on episode #109, Excellent Women by Barbara Pym.

We are discussing the work of crime novelist Dorothy B. Hughes and in particular her suspenseful and subversive novel In a Lonely Place (1947), freely adapted as a classic film noir by director Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame.

Also in this episode Norah and Becky pitch titles by Kay Dick, Stella Gibbons and R.C. Sherriff to Andy, John and Nicky. Make sure you have a pen and paper to hand...

Books mentioned:

Dorothy B. Hughes - In a Lonely Place; The Expendable Man; Ride the Pink Horse; Dread Journey
Kay Dick - They: A Sequence of Unease
Stella Gibbons - Starlight
Barbara Comyns - The Vet’s Daughter
Nina Hammett - Twisted Torso
R.C. Sherriff - The Fortnight in September; The Hopkins Manuscript
Philip Larkin - The Whitsun Weddings
Douglas Adams - Last Chance to See (audio version)
Jim Thompson - The Killer Inside Me
David Goodis - Nightfall
Donald Henderson - Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper
Patricia Highsmith - Deep Water
James M. Cain - The Postman Always Rings Twice

Other links:

In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950) Criterion Edition
Travelogue film of California, 1947
Andy on Sentimental Garbage talking about R.C. Sherriff
Megan Abbott - ‘Dorothy B. Hughes & the Birth of American Noir’ in the Paris Review (Aug, 2017)
Christine Smallwood - ‘The Crime of Blackness: Dorothy B. Hughes’s Forgotten Noir’ New Yorker (Aug, 2012)