“I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” — Dix Steel In A Lonely Place.

By PJ Parrish

I was sleepless in unsettlement — it had been a rough week what with apocalyptic smoke-sulphuric skies and gut parasites — so as usual I turned to my private Ambien — Turner Classic Movies. Eddie Muller was just coming on to introduce In A Lonely Place.

Two hours later, I was still wide awake and in awe. How in the world had I missed this movie? I devour old noir films yet this one had somehow always eluded me, even though it’s considered a classic. I come to you today, fedora in hand, deeply ashamed.

Humphrey Bogart, in what might be his finest performance, sheds his heroic armor to play the boozy, trigger-temper screenwriter Dix Steele, suspected of murder and captivated by his failed-starlet neighbor Gloria Grahame (who can say more with one raised eyebrow than most of today’s actresses can do with their lines.)

This isn’t your conventional noir. It’s more a psychological thriller and a heartbreaking love story. There’s no happily-ever-after, just what one writer called “an epitath for love.” It’s also a meditation on movies and screenwriting, and male cruelty. In the end, it also has an oddly feminist undernote.

I was so entranced by the movie that the next morning, I hied over to my library where I found the source material — Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1947 book. (It was re-issued three years ago by Penguin Modern Classics). Okay, again I confess shame, as I had never read the book. I’ve been making my way through the oldies for years now, But this one…wow.

I’m not alone here in my ignorance. The critic John Powers wrote:

It’s something of an axiom that good novels make bad movies, but one of my favorite exceptions is In A Lonely Place. For years, I lazily assumed that [director Nicolas Ray] had turned a lousy pulp thriller into a silk purse. Then one day, I finally read it. And I discovered that the novel is more groundbreaking than the film. And that Hughes belongs in the crime writing pantheon with male icons like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Now I have to turn to crime novelist Megan Abbot, who wrote the afterword for the re-issue::

Reading In a Lonely Place for the first time is like finding the long-lost final piece to an enormous puzzle. Within its Spanish bungalows, its eucalyptus-scented shadows, you feel as though you’ve discovered a delicious and dark secret, a tantalizing page-turner with sneakily subversive undercurrents. [Its]  influence on crime fiction is unsung yet inescapable. From Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson to Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Harris, nearly every “serial killer” tale of the last seventy years bears its imprint—both in terms of its sleek, relentless style and its claustrophobic “mind of the criminal” perspective.

But its larger influence derives from Hughes’s uncanny grasp of the connection between violence and misogyny and an embattled masculinity. And its importance extends beyond form or genre and into cultural mythos: the birth of American noir.

That last part about toxic masculinity is important. Because while that aspect is present in the movie in the form of Bogart’s seething anger, the book is where the violence really boils over.

I was taken by how different the film is from the book. (Yes, we can name dozens of cases where this is true in crime fiction — and please feel free to weigh in here). But it’s really striking here.

In the book, Dix Steele is an actual serial killer, but in the movie he is a mere suspect in one hat-check girl’s death. In the book Steele is a true psychopath, who fakes being a crime novelist so he can sponge off a wealthy uncle. An ex fighter pilot, Steele is frustrated that his post-war life is so lifeless and emasculating, Steele turns to stalking and killing women for kicks. “They were all alike, cheats, liars, whores,” Steele says in the book. “Even the pious ones were only waiting for a chance to cheat and lie and whore.”

In the movie, Steele is still hot-headed but more as a screenwriter poisoned by temper and his desperation for another hit. And he is fatally capable of falling in love.

As Megan Abbott sagely noted, Hughes has always been fascinated by the loners who lurk on society’s edge. Hughes’ 1963 thriller The Expendable Man tackled American racism. With In A Lonely Place, she plunges us deep into Dix’s warped psyche. It reminds me somewhat of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, in that we almost want to root for the guy because he’s so damaged.

Then there’s that feminist note I mentioned. The book, unlike the movie, is a scathing indictment of toxic masculinity.  And while the movie ends on plaintive note, the book is a twisty paen to post-war girl power. Again, I’ll quote Megan Abbott:

Dix’s story reveals the essence of being a violent hater. He tries to control his feelings of sadness and powerlessness, not through self-knowledge or personal change, but by finding someone to blame and erase — in this case, women. But far from bringing him salvation or even relief, his hatred turns out to be the loneliest place of all.

To his mind, the enemy is not the war, its trauma, but what men face upon their return: staid domesticity, the strictures of class, emasculation. And these threats are embodied wholly in women. Women, whose penetrating gazes are far mightier than his sword.

In case you haven’t seen or read either, I won’t give them away the two endings. I’ll leave that for you enjoy.

So, which is better — book or movie? I loved them both, for different reasons. The central theme is there in both, that the lonely place is not without, but within. Well, let’s let Hughes, via Dix Steele, tell you what that feels like:

Fear wasn’t a jagged split of light cleaving you; fear wasn’t a cold fist in your entrails; fear wasn’t something you could face and demolish with your arrogance. Fear was the fog, creeping about you, winding its tendrils about you, seeping into your pores and flesh and bone. Fear was a girl whispering a word over and again, a small word you refused to hear although the whisper was a scream in your ears, a dreadful scream you could never forget. You heard it over and again and the fog was a ripe red veil you could not tear away from your eyes.

In A Lonely Place. Watch it. Read it. You’ll thank me.