Dime Dames

Dix Steele is on the stalk. Fog fond and flight wild, he's like some hypermanic autopilot looking for a vic. Dix's vics, of course, are chicks. And the more they remind him of a certain her, the better. Slunk low on the corner of darkness and fear, he's in perfect position to pounce.

Dix Steele is also a scumbag. A fake and a fraud and a coward. A nothing. A no one. And without question one of the least sympathetic antagonists in pulp fiction. Which is probably why Bogie decided to flip the script and make Dix innocent before taking him on a star turn. Dix would have ruined even Humphrey's rep.

In A Lonely PlaceI write of In A Lonely Place (The Feminist Press $14.95), the pure pulp classic that Nicholas Ray reworked into a film noir staple. But lets forget for a sec the flick; I'm here to plug books, and In A Lonely Place is one helluva pluggable book. A hard-boiled, bare-boned he-did-it, written by a she, a dame named Dorothy B. Hughes.

Surprised?

Post World War II America was hardly the most enlightened place for dames of any persuasion, let alone dames in the dime novel racket. That makes Hughes one exceptional exception. (According to an incredibly helpful Publisher's Forward, Leigh Brackett - most noted for the script behind The Big Sleep - was another, though most thought that she was a he.) A gun molling wordslinger who took it to the tough guys, Hughes's coup is not so much about a single book (...Place is just one of 11 written and released in the '40s, and but one of 3 made into motion pictures), but about a singular notion. As far as I suspect - and as far as Lisa Maria Hogeland's revealing Afterword makes clear - Hughes is one of the - if not the - first pulpists to eschew the hero's-eye-view and in its stead work the murderer's own angle.

And what an unright angle it is. Like I said, Steele's a sinister sad sack of a madman fretful, tearful, a downwrong dope. And, again, one who elicits absolutely no sympathy whatsoever. That Hughes paints the heavy runt in such unflattering light and then has him lead the wary way was a milestone; that she then had nerve enough to let a dame make the case put her one up to almost snuffing the big boys at their own guy's game. It is for this that Hogeland calls Hughes a "proto-feminist." Me, I simply call her one damn good storyteller.

The Girls in 3-BIn A Lonely Place joins Valerie Taylor's The Girls in 3-B ("Small-Town Girls and Big-City Passions Collide") and Faith Baldwin's Skyscraper ("Career - Marriage - or Romance with a Dashing Stranger? What's a Girl To Do?"), as one of three reprints in the ultra-promising Femmes Fatales series. This being The Feminist Press, there's an agenda, one advanced and reinforced by rigorously-researched, scholar-specific Afterwords (cite, respectively, Lisa Walker and Laura Hapke), which includes the kinda arcana not generally found adjoining dime market dreadfuls. I dig the details, the Skyscraperbackground, the polemic - then again, I believe that many things dudes can do dames can do better. But the stories have gotta come first. And here the stories rate the scholarly hooray. Damn good that the Femmes at the Feminist Press are doing whatever it takes to reload the American Canon.

Fire away, ladies.

Note: This article was first published online in the now defunct Bully Magazine. Supplied with immense thanks to Ken Wohlrob.

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