Backlisted - In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes

Episode Date: July 5, 2021

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. This time 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...Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)15:00 - Starlight by Stella Gibbons19:10 - The Fortnight In September26:56 - In A Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights. There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment, and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale at Planet Fitness end July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See

Home Club for details. Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation.

And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. hey everyone this is hey Hey, everyone. Hey. Hey.

Becky Brown, I would like to ask you to tell me about, because I've only read about this in press releases, in newspapers. So I would like you to exclusively tell me the story of how you managed to sell a book that you found in a secondhand bookshop in a five-way auction to in a five way auction. It is an amazing story. Tell us how you did it. Well, I found it in Oxfam in Bath. And I did actually make when because Nora and I, we've now both moved out of London. And when we were making our case for moving ourselves remotely, I was like, I found a book that I'm going to sell for a very large amount of money.

And I found it in Bath. And I need access to the bookshops in Bath. And that's where the books are. Yeah, that's where all the good books are. In London, that would have been gone in a second. But no, you know, in Bath, it was probably there for weeks. And what is the book? Tell us.

So the book is called They, a Sequence of Unease by Kay Dick, who was an absolutely remarkable woman, the youngest ever female publishing director in the UK and the first ever at 26. Just an extraordinary person and a complete kind of just right at the centre of the 20th century literary scene. She wrote, I think, seven novels and then some really interesting nonfiction. century literary scene she wrote I think seven novels and then some really interesting non-fiction and she edited George Orwell um just an absolutely extraordinary woman who has fallen completely you know completely out not only of the kind of literary world's eye but just the whole world's eye and I was I was in Oxfam and I saw this spine that was probably four millimeters across and it had the word they written on it just black on white it looked like it'd been written by an ant and I was just like what is that and I pulled

it out and it had this extraordinary cover of just just this silhouette of a man and just this huge word they and then k dick at the bottom and I'd never heard of k dick so I was like well it's 50p I'll take it home and at that point we were kind of you know it was the summer of the pandemic and i couldn't read for the life of me i hadn't read a book for months i mean don't tell curtis brown but i honestly hadn't apart from you know kind of my work reading i hadn't been able to pick anything up and i sort of i took it i took it in the bath with me and i opened it and i read the first few pages and I was like oh oh this is this isn't just good this is remarkable and then within two hours I'd read it and it is this it's this dystopian near future Britain and you're in the kind of coasting countryside in the south and

you're in this kind of and you don't actually realize till the end of the book that you've never found out whether the protagonist is a man or a woman, you know nothing about them really. And they are part of this tiny fragmented, not even a colony, because they can't really keep in touch with each other, but this kind of band of artists, intellectuals, creatives who are on the run from a dystopian organisation called They. And They is just a mob. It's kind of, I see it almost as the sort of nth degree of sort of, you know, the mob at the capsule, just like a violent sort of mob with nothing, you have nothing, you want nothing, you are just violent. What year was this originally published?

Oh, 1977. 1977. Oh, 70s dystopia. It won the Southeast arts literature prize did you did you know that john or have you have you no it's just just a bit of a bit of swift googling so right when will other people be able to buy it read it and will it be available for 50p or will it be a mark up i think there will be a slight increase in cost yeah you'll be able to buy it in february 2022 from faber in the uk mcnally editions in the us and cannot in canada good lord so basically you've woven gold out of air haven't you there 96 pages of air incredible but also what also what an amazing thing to have the opportunity and the skill to recognise the worth of something and talk to people and make it happen, Becky.

What a brilliant thing. Well, but before I bask in that glory, I should give a shout out to backlisted regular Lucy Scholes, who actually found it at basically the same time as me. I think a fortnight before me, she took it out the London Library. It was it was extraordinary. And what happened was when I finished reading it, I went to Google it, you know, and I was fully expecting it to be, you know, a Penguin Modern Classic or something. And I was just, you know, too much of a yokel to have found it. And and she had written a column on it for the Paris Review that had literally been published days before um I had read it so it was a real sort of serendipity it just felt like this glorious kind of yeah serendipitous moment Becky sent it to me like

I think it was like what was it sort of like nine nine separate files of scans and I was at that point painting my flat and sleeping on my brother's couch and she sent to me about sort of like eight o'clock at night and was like you know all these files coming through and I sat there and I was at that point painting my flat and sleeping on my brother's couch and she sent to me about sort of like eight o'clock at night and was like you know all these files coming through and I sat there and it was I mean just testament to the experience of reading that book was that I sort of sat there on my phone and read through tiny like phone photographs of this book with Becky's thumb sort of imprinted on every page and it was just absolutely riveting experience it was extraordinary that's that's the edition everyone will want to read next year it's the only edition edition absolutely

I want to know how do you go from finding a book in a bookshop to then it being published by favor and favor how does that happen well Nora and I we've developed like we have a kind of whole network of ways of finding out who the beneficiary of an estate is. Although I didn't actually need it with KDIC because they've made a beautiful website. So I just Googled KDIC estate and there it was. It's honestly the most fun part of the job, the kind of just exhuming the kind of connections backwards, you know, usually from a will or from a probate document and finding out who actually looks after something. So I was in touch with them within i think three days hard-boiled literary detectives i think is technically yeah that's us that's right

the gumshoes exactly the state gumshoes the gumshoes of the literary world hitting those pavements so this was the informal chat bit of this. That was the informal bit. That was just the light-hearted warm-up. Imagine. Well, so nice to have you back. Anyway, John, do you want to start the formal chat? Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in Santa Monica in the late 1940s. Yellow fog is seeping in from the ocean and a bus pulls in ahead of us. A woman descends, brown hair, brown suit, brown pumps and bag, a small brown felt hat. Her heels ring out on the winding pavement and we start to follow her. She makes her way down. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher on Bound, the platform where readers

crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Millerinson, the publisher on Bound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and joining us today are returning guests Nora Perkins and Becky Brown. Hello both of you. Hello, it's nice to be back. And Nora and Becky previously appeared on episode 109 on Barbara Pym's Excellent Women, which has proved to be one of the most popular episodes of Batlisted. Nora and Becky, did you enjoy listening back to it? I'm afraid to say that we have never listened to it. Too embarrassing.

Thanks a lot. No, apparently I laughed too loudly the whole way through my family has told me that i laughed uproariously you think yeah we get that we get that most weeks yeah to ignore ignore your family nora that's so that's my sage advice don't tell them yeah okay good my dad says he's not listening anymore because he can't tell when i'm speaking when andy's speaking as though that is in some way a problem. I find that hard to believe. Sorry, Mr. Mitchinson, if you're listening now.

But John's beautiful velvet tones against my disgusting polyester drone. That seems impossible. You guys are like silk and velvet, not polyester. Oh, that's nice. I think we're like Bailey's and

Tizer. I think it's more like silk cut Rothmans. Yeah. I like it, Nicky. Very nice. Oh, dear. Where were we?

I'm still doing the introduction. This is the formal introduction. Nora and Becky are the joint custodians of the Curtis Brown Heritage List of Literary Estates, where they look after the works and legacies of over 150 writers, including Iris Murdoch, Stella Gibbons, Douglas Adams, Elizabeth Bowen, Gerald and Lawrence Durrell,

both of them unhappy about that posthumously, I imagine, Margaret Kennedy and Laurie Lee. They have been friends for eight years and colleagues for four, and that's better than if it were the other way round. Becky Moonlights, as an anthologist, her most recent book, Blitz Spirit, which anthologises the wartime thoughts of mass observation diarists, was published by Hodder in October last year.

I remember talking about this when you joined us for our first internet podcast over a year ago. And we might talk about that in a bit, actually, because you've added another experiential string to your bow in terms of understanding the industry from all possible angles and Nora in similarly in her spare hours runs work and turn a letter press and book binding studio it's all about books and that's the thing when about doing this like we all are involved with reading books writing books publishing, finding books in bookshops, printing the things. I mean, it's all books in the words of Toni Morrison, isn't it, John? It's all books. I did a little interview today for Book Brunch, and they asked you a question,

what is it you do when you're not working? And I said, I read. But, I mean, isn't that the thing Everybody who works? I mean, it seems to me if you're not working in this industry, if you're not reading all the time, it's a very odd, very odd industry to work in. Anyway, the book that Nora and Becky have chosen for today's episode is In a Lonely Place, the 11th novel by American crime writer Dorothy B Hughes first published in 1947 by Dwell, Sloan and Pierce and very loosely adapted as a classic Hollywood film noir of the same title by Nicholas Ray in 1950 with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Graham as the stars. The protagonist in both

book and film is Dixon Steele but in the book he's a young and restless former World War II pilot who's fetched up in LA intending to try his hand at writing fiction. Dix contacts his wartime buddy Barab Nikolai, now an LAPD detective getting nowhere fast in his pursuit of a serial killer, ostensibly to get inspiration and horse's mouth detail to inspire his own writing. At the same time there's the distraction of Laurel Gray, a beautiful aspiring actress who rents an apartment in the same block, and the cool scepticism of Sylvia, Brub's wife, to contend with. Dix soon begins to feel the heat and then starts losing the plot. And it's probably worth me saying at this point, in terms of losing the plot,

or the plot, we are going to discuss this book fully and properly and that means because it's impossible to discuss this book without revealing certain details that i'm giving you a health warning immediately this week that you listeners may choose to skip ahead to the end of the show because we can't discuss this book without revealing certain details. But Nora, do you just want to give a quick shout out for another book by Dorothy Hughes that we're not going to mention because, well, tell them why. Well, absolutely. So I think the book we're not going to mention is The Expendable Man, which was actually one of our first picks to do this.

But it has such a brilliant twist that we're not going to say anything about that we thought best to leave it and let you experience that on your own. And it's a marvellous book. And actually on that topic, I just wanted to say there was an amazing time blurb for The Expendable Man back in the day,

which I thought I should share with everybody because it made me laugh. But the Time magazine says about The Expendable Man, which is like a really important, beautiful, wonderful book, a surprise twist gasper about a young doc who picks up a sick chick and gets framed by a hack dick for her kill. Oh, yeah. So that's the expendable man which we're not talking about today well you know and i i mean john and i both i think we both read

the expendable man this week that is an absolutely terrific book but it's so great this is why becky and nora are so great because when we were talking before the show started they're going well we would love to do this but you can't do it without giving stuff away. And the pleasure of the book is discovering it for yourself. So anyway, so The Expendable Man is also a great book, but we're talking about In a Lonely Place. But before we begin unpeeling the layers of this masterpiece of revisionist noir, and in place of our usual what have you been reading slot, visionist noir, and in place of our usual what have you been reading slots, last time Becky and Nora were on, they were a smash hit because we asked them to pitch in, I believe I gave you 30 seconds on that occasion, a series of books that listeners went bananas for, including Troy Chimneys

by Margaret Kennedy, A Helping Hand by Celia Dale, A Wreath for the Enemy by Pamela Frankel, and Figures in a Landscape by Barry England. Thank you, by Barry England. So we didn't want to miss out the opportunity to have Becky and Nora treat us again so we are going to ask you on this occasion going to pitch one book each you got one minute to pitch and then we will discuss the book amongst ourselves for four minutes and let you know what we think so let's go first to you Becky Brown what book are you pitching to Batlisted today? I'm pitching Starlight by Stella Gibbons. And I had, you know, like when I have a forum like this one, I was like, God, well, how shall I use it?

How shall I weaponize this moment for maximum impact? And I, the thing with Stella Gibbons is that everybody's like, I love Cold Comfort Farm. Andy Milif is holding a timer at me. Everyone loves Cold Comfort Farm. And they come in and they're like where are all the other funny farm books and you're like I can't help you like that's the one and it kind of it hung over her for the rest of her life but she wrote so many good novels and many of them were based in London where she lived her entire life and to me Starlight is Stella's

greatest London novel and it is based in the kind of bomb ruined kind of shell of, you know, sort of poor London in the sort of late forties and early fifties. And you have this elderly pair of sisters, one of whom is bedridden, the other whom never stopped talking and is absolutely enormous. And they are subsisting at the very edge of, you know, they are, they are one terrible thing away from starvation and right at

the beginning you think you are being fed this moment here's the jeopardy a terrible man a rack man has built their house um and he's been i'm going to rebuild this house but i'm going to raise the rent and chuck you out and you think there's the jeopardy how will they defeat the terrible rack man and then you realize actually no the rack man is redoing the house. He's not raising the rent and he's moving his beautiful, ethereal, very fragile wife in downstairs. And around this, you have this huge patchwork of London. You have the Cypriot cafe where one of the old ladies works. You have the elderly man upstairs. You have some secret mission that you don't know about.

You have this Barbara Pym-esque pair of priests one of whom is like learning from the other and then suddenly amongst the all you realize no this this wife is possessed by an actual demon and the and it's a horror story it has all the trappings of a middle-brow social comedy but it is a cold hard hit you in the face horror story that ends in one of the grisliest exorcisms I've ever read well you went over but who cares brilliant brilliant brilliant brilliant I detect flavors of Barbara Cummings yes it's there it has that thing where you think you know the world and you see the horizon and then the axis tilts but it's so funny like there's more there's more humour in a paragraph than in any Barbara Cummings novel start to finish.

Before we come back to this excellent novel, I've just read Nina Hamnett's first volume of autobiography, Laughing Torso, which was published in the mid-30s. And that, listeners, is genuinely like reading a Barbara Cummings novel where none of the names have been changed. One of the most remarkable pieces of outsider art. It's been my pleasure to read for a while. So I'm going to talk about that on the next episode.

Becky, is Starlight by Stella Gibbons currently in print? It is with vintage classics with a beautiful cover and actually really good blurb. And to what extent is it like Cold Comfort Farm? Well, in my view, it's kind of the spiritual successor to Cold Comfort Farm in that it is absolutely bats. It has this extraordinary sprawling cast. Like I haven't even touched on the kind of the German refugee

or the old lady who holds seances in her house or the young girl who's obsessed with um this guy who owns the stable I mean there's I could literally I could just list characters probably for the next five minutes that it has that kind of almost Dickensian cast of kind of eccentrics but no she I mean she was so she wrote you know Cold Comfort Farm she wrote really quite young and she wrote for the rest of her life and Starlight isn't even amongst the latest of books but I think it is one of the most accomplished of her novels it just is wonderful I laughed probably a hundred times and I cried once listeners you know what you know what to do marvelous thank you very much right and almost exactly five minutes Nikki you. Nora, you have one minute starting from now to pitch us.

Well, my pitch this time is a novel that I did laugh, but I wept my way through most of it. So here you go. But it's for a book about as perfect a novel as I've ever read. And it's by R.C. Sheriff, who wrote the play Journey's End, which we all know really well and which is taught in schools. But this one's called The Fortnight in September. And actually, to be honest,

Kazuo Ishiguro pitched this absolutely impeccably in the paper last April. He chose it as his kind of lockdown, uplifting, life-affirming novel. And he just, it's a sort of perfect lockdown book because it does restore your faith in humanity utterly. And on the face of it, it's about the most undramatic sort of modest story imaginable. It's about a suburban family from a quiet, dullish street in the 30s who travel. They go on the train every year to Bognor Regis on their annual fortnight's holiday. And they go in September because their father's a clerk.

And, you know that's when he can get away from his office and they stay in the same lodgings very humble as they always do the same landlady and they have every year they have a cask of ginger beer which they tap and they drink through um and so everything's exactly the same as they always have every single year except this year they have a rather nicer beach hut than usual with a little balcony and they have an extra cask of ginger beer, which is sort of crucial. And so the book is just their lives. It's day to day and it's about sort of the small fretfulnesses and the quiet joys of being on holiday, swimming in the sea, holiday romance that doesn't really come to anything and sort of leaves

a bit of a bad taste and all the entwined like love and claustrophobia that is particular to spending time with your family. And you might think this would be the most mundane book in the world, but it is utter magic and it captures all the humanity and the decency and the sort of beautiful dignity that you find in everyday lives. And it's not pretentious. R.C. Sheriff is just a miraculous writer. He never condescends to these very normal people. And it made not pretentious. R.C. Sheriff is just a miraculous writer. He never condescends to these to these very normal people. And it made me weep for the first time on page 10 when the daughter pops by her elderly neighbor to arrange about looking after the family's canary, whose name is Joe. And then I wept all the way through the rest of the book. I mean, it's sort of a beautiful, joyful weeping, but it is just the most exquisite, subtle, marvellous novel.

And if there's something I could compare it to for readers, it would probably be the oeuvre, the works of Philip Larkin, especially like Wits and Weddings, something like that, which just has that sort of sense of humanity and microcosm and beauty. It's on a train. I mean, it takes them 100 pages to get past Clapham Junction, if I remember rightly. Absolutely. We've nearly done this book on Batlisted so many times. It's one of my favourites. Please do it. Funny enough, we mentioned it on the last episode because when I was on Sentimental Garbage, Carolina Donoghue's podcast, this is the book that I chose to talk about. I mean, I agree with agree with you Nora I just think it's beautiful and funny and moving and all those things but also it's so unusual for its era because

of the people that Sheriff was writing about those people don't get written about very much in fiction so it's a really important book I'm totally fascinated by R.C. Sheriff. He was a screenwriter as well as a playwright wasn't he because he He didn't adapt the screenplay for Goodbye Mr. Chips. He did. He also, he's got a load of other novels. I mean, I know Persephone have republished this and the Hopkins manuscript and Green Gates. And the Hopkins manuscript's with Penguin now.

Is it? Ah, okay. But he wrote novels in the 40s. He wrote a novel called Chedworth, right, in the 40s. And Another Year. That's another one. And also he lived in Kingston-upon-Thames with his mum. And he wrote an autobiography called No Leading Lady. So I think we can make assumptions about R.C. Sheriff, which perhaps are unfair. I don't know. I like the sound of Chedworth yeah it's a marvelous book in his book

Leading Lady in his memoir he writes about the writing of um of the fortnight in September which I think was his first novel and about how like learning how to write about these exactly kind of people and it's just a gorgeous sort of you know how to write a novel how to think about voice and and what it means to write about humble people um it's it's brilliant it's a wonderful memoir i would like to ask before we move on to the main book i would like to ask like i i find it quite frustrating when i recommend the fortnight into september to people that there is no audio book and in fact on backlisted itlisted, it's totally hit and miss as to whether there are audio books in the books we cover, sometimes because they are obscure, but often they're just old.

So are audio books part of your remit within Curtis Brown Heritage? And when you do a deal now, are you trying to do an audio deal at the same time? Absolutely. And Fortnite in September is a funny one because it will have an audio um i hope i don't think i'll speak out of turn but it's um being commissioned for book at bedtime so there's going to be a wonderful audio edition come audio coming out yeah really exciting and then um we're also going to um audio rights are in in the works as well and i should

say for our american listeners um it's Simon and Schuster are publishing it in beautiful beautiful covers in September this year so it's going to have a gorgeous new life there as well and in audio as well so very exciting so I just I just listened to Last Chance to See because I was talking about that for a thing by Douglas Adams and I listened to the audio as a book I've read many times I listened to the audio book by matthew baynton read by matthew baynton which was terrific right so is part of your time now spent because of the audio boom finding people not to record them but finding publishers or or audiobook companies to create audiobooks for titles which should perhaps you know people might be surprised for instance there are no audiobooks of titles which should perhaps,

you know, people might be surprised. For instance, there are no audiobooks of Jean Rees's Backlist. You know, there are all sorts of things that would benefit from audio. It's an interesting one because now, if you sell a book now, you pretty much, I mean, you don't always have to sell audio, but a lot of the time it is considered sort of, you know, like you can't do a deal unless you include it. But what is interesting is that so much of what's available now, and actually I was thinking about this with Dorothy B. Shoes, it was only republished in 2010 in a lonely place. If you think however many decades that would print in the UK, but in that initial period of republishing backlist when audio wasn't really a thing,

it was always done quite sort of cheaply and there really weren't the resources for that whereas now you know for example with anything we sell now we pretty much always have a an audio edition but we're catching up I think with the older things for sure absolutely and I think there are there are real holes I mean you know you look at a lot of I mean Stella Gibbons a lot of a lot of brilliant books um that you know have we sort of did a wonderful republishing thing and but then audio is kind of you know sort of it's been sort of 10 years down the line and now we're going back and making sure Laurie Lee for instance it's been ages and actually there's there's a wonderful recording of Laurie reading um as I walked out and it's only you know just now that we're finally

getting that sort of sorted out and organized there's old rights tangles as well you have to sort out. Yeah, yeah. Me and Mitch are going to start bootlegging some of the backlisted titles. We're just going to record them on dictaphones and stick them up on YouTube, aren't we, John? Well, we're available and, you know, relatively modestly priced. You get a bit of both. We do different voices. If you want a polyester reading of In a Lonely Place,

that's coming up. The book chat will continue on the other side of this message. Did you see Mr. Steele last night? Yes. As I came home, I saw him going to his apartment with a girl. That girl was murdered between one and two o'clock this morning. First, you have to have enough imagination to visualize the crime. You're driving up the canyon. You put your right arm around her neck. you get to a lonely place in the road

and you begin to squeeze you're an ex-GI, you know judo you know how to kill a person go ahead, go ahead, bro, squeeze harder That's from the trailer of the very famous film adaptation of In a Lonely Place, directed by Nicholas Ray in 1950. We'll talk a bit about it later on, but that was Gloria Graham and Humphrey Bogart.

Let me ask you, Becky, when did you first come across the work of Dorothy B. Hughes or In a Lonely Place? I mean, the first encounter I had with Dorothy B. Hughes was actually The Expendable Man Hughes or In a Lonely Place? I mean, the first encounter I had with Dorothy B Hughes was actually The Expendable Man rather than In a Lonely Place. And that came to me as part of a Persephone subscription. And actually, my husband had chosen it for me. I mean, you know, I opened it expecting, you know, kind of tablecloths and teacups and sort of, you know, English social comedy I suppose and and it was just well I mean we'll get on to the fact that it was not that but it really I think it resonated with me because I had never I wasn't I didn't see myself as kind of a crime reader or a noir reader or anything like that and I certainly not really even a genre reader and it was just such a remarkable achievement

like I mean you know anyone who's read it will say, like, it is a perfect novel. And then it wasn't actually, weirdly, it wasn't until over a decade later that I picked up In a Lonely Place in the middle of the pandemic, because all I could read was good genre. I had finished all of Georgette Heyer and I was like, I'm going to read

the rest of Dorothy B. Shears. And Nora, did you find In a Lonely Place an easy read or a difficult read or something else entirely? Well, I mean, I grew up steeped in, I guess, neo-noir. I read a lot of noir as a kid and I read all the Sarah Paretsky novels and Sue Grafton and the kind of queens, the later Latter-day queens of 90s noir. And so I think coming to In a Lonely Place much more recently and as a kind of pandemic read, it felt like it was, it felt like a terrible sort of, I think not just the pandemic, but all the talk about incels, about PTSD, about all the things that we've, you know,

sort of last 10 years have kind of brought up in terms of mental health, in terms of, and especially during the pandemic, when all of this stuff gets concentrated, it felt really like incredibly relevant to right now, and in a way that I didn't expect. And I think in it, for me, it felt much less like kind of hard-boiled good sort of, you know, fun than an absolutely prescient, complex, riveting story that does not let anybody get off lightly, that doesn't let the reader feel anything but kind of terrible pity and fear. And so it was a hard read, I think, is a brutal read, but riveting and brilliant. And again, I mean, you know, it is a page turner as well. So for a pandemic, when you're like, I mean, you know, it is a page turner as well. So for a pandemic when you're like the sort of, you know,

ticking, you know, news feed is overwhelming. I feel like really this whole podcast was a chance for me to go like deep dive back into the world of noir and to rediscover and then to sort of read new too. So I think it was a perfect pandemic read, but, you know, not for the faint hearted. Mitch, how did you find it? Once again, Andy, I find myself kind of outraged by the canon. I used to, I mean, I used to love

noir. I read masses and masses of noir. I was a massive Jim Thompson fan and David Goodis fan at the time when I think not millions of people were. I mean, this would be kind of late 80s, early 90s. So here I am yet again in my late 50s reading a brilliant female writer, writing in a genre that I love and not having known about her work until relatively recent. I'm just, again, I'm just, I'm cross with myself. Maybe she wasn't, maybe her books weren't out there. I just don't know. But they, you know, when you talk about that sort of list of names, the great noir writers, and obviously that, you know, when you talk about women and noir, you talk about femme fatale, but here we've got something so original and

different. Thank you both for suggesting it. I've. Like Andy, I've loved reading these books. When Becky and Nora suggested In a Lonely Place, I was really excited because initially I was thinking, great, I've never read it, but I've seen the film like half a dozen times, right? And that was a false storm, listeners, because it turns out the film is not anything like the book. So that's the first thing.

The second thing is when I started reading the novel i thought oh this is great like my knowledge of crime fiction is probably quite spotty but actually for me coming into in a lonely place and here's the first spoiler we can't avoid it's written from the perspective of a murderer of what what we now call a serial killer, though it wouldn't have been called a serial killer at the time. And I thought, OK, this is really interesting. This is written by a woman, but this is in the tradition of Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton. Or it's like, funnily enough, a book I talked about on Backlisted a couple of months ago,

Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper by Donald Henderson. In addition to being The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson or Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith Deep Water actually I think is closer to the or I mean of course the comparisons with Chandler and Kane and Hammett but actually it's a really fascinating example of a genre novel where the author is doing what she needs to do to be part of the genre while totally turning genre tropes upside down and um i i just thought it was totally fascinating completely fascinating and noir i mean, it is noir, but how can it be noir while, let me float this idea to you. It's a noir book in which one of the attributes of noir is that

the male protagonist is under threat. But in this noir, the male protagonist is the threat and that that seems to me very unusual for the genre right i think something i found really interesting i i watched so i am like the reverse of you and i've read the book three times i've never seen the film and i watched the film for the first time two days ago and apparently Dorothee B. Hughes was not cross about what they did to her book but what what is fascinating is that in the film Humphrey Bogart is just he's like oh you know he's really sort of um he's violent he's an artist nobody understands him and yeah and what she's trying to do in the book is she's trying to understand why does this man kill women and in the film it's like

oh no you know that's just that's just dicks he just punches people well you know you say that becky but i'm gonna politely but formally disagree with you i think the film is about male rage that is one of the things that the film is about so dicks in the film isn't a murderer but he is not a nice man he's played by humphrey bogart but he's not a nice man right and i think the film questions whether we should accept that behavior from people just because they're good at writing. You know, that's one of the things that the film is about. You know, we'll hear later on, speaking of spoilers, we'll hear the end of the film.

But did you feel, Becky, did you feel the spirit of the book was there or not? No, I really don't think it is. I mean, I can see, like, as a kind of, you know, as someone in the Hollywood industry, you know, as they are portrayed in the film, I could see why you would pick that book up and be like, wow, this is already a fantastic film. And then I just don't understand why you would just take three character names and write an entirely different film. There is a reason I'm a literary Asian and not a film critic. I'm a literary Asian and not a film critic. I kind of agree about the male rage, though.

I think that that's the strand that kind of connects all of that classic noir. And John, I kind of feel like you do. I read it. I took a lot of noir in and read, you know, everything, you know, when I was younger. And I feel like I didn't maybe I didn't recognize it as much. And I do think the film carries that thread through that it is that there is a sort of sense of absolute like violence and machismo that is terrifying. So he sort of has the seed of that, that sense of warning that he's broadcasting, that he's a terrible, terrible threat to women, even if it isn't quite as far as portraying a serial killer.

But I was ashamed too, to not having picked up as much. But that theme is relevant to now as well, right? Appalling male behaviour, is relevant to now as well, right? Appalling male behaviour, institutional appalling male behaviour, that's one of the things that the novel is about and the film is about. I mean, just technically what she does, which I think is kind of, is that she,

although we say that we know that he's the murderer from early on and that is broadly true, as a reader, we're beginning to join the dots up in a way that he doesn't murderer from early on and that is broadly as a reader we're beginning to join the dots up in a way that he doesn't join the dots out himself he thinks that he's smarter than everybody else in the book and we can clearly see that he's not um and it's it's i just think it's it's technically to to do that so that i mean you ought to mind that you know that he's the murderer but the skill of her writing is that she's inviting you to understand how somebody can delude themselves

into performing such terrible acts and still go and order sandwiches, which she does a hell of a lot. There's a lot of sandwiches in this novel. Yeah. I love the food. All the, like, you know, Swiss and ham on rye. Yeah. I love the food.

It's so interesting about the sort of knowing more than he does, because I felt like what Dorothy Hughes was doing was drawing a portrait of someone in, in, in, in ways that we saw things about himself that he showed us that he didn't realize he was showing. It's just showing his hand without realizing it.

And it was, it was the, for me, it were two things. One of which was this like he's incredibly triggered and I was completely fascinated by this and it comes up the whole way through by sounds and it's like the electric razor and the coffee percolator and the grind of a bus engine and the vacuum he's like on edge all the time about these sounds and he doesn't realize he is

not really and we see that he is absolutely it's ptsd it's on the knife edge he's come back from the war and it's that triggering quality and it's terrifying for him and i'm sure you know and but but we see that i don't think he does and the other thing is is booze and he drinks a lot of rye when he doesn't want it or doesn't need it but he drinks all the way through and and and he was worried about going on a binge he's like just on the edge of self-control but he's still drinking it's just sort of like you know it's that self-medication and that edginess so becky is he a classic example of an unreliable narrator well i mean it's interesting i mean i was i was thinking actually like nora you said the word incel earlier and when i reread it it was the first thing I thought of that because he is he is crafting an ideology around his failings so you know he is there's this woman

and he loved her and she rejected him and he destroyed her and he's going now assuming that actually destruction is what makes me happy I don't need love I don't need family I don't need love. I don't need family. I don't need warmth. I need just me and this occasional destruction to kind of reinvigorate myself. And I think that in that sense, I do think he is a sort of reliable narrator of himself. He just doesn't. It just takes some looking between the lines. Or maybe that does mean he's unreliable. I don't know. I think that his unreliability is in his sense of himself as a kind of nietzschean superman you know that's where you can't rely on him because he is fundamentally outwitted by women uh which would be a direct affront to his idea of what he is and and his

place in the world right but don't don't you think he recognizes the kind of power in women too that he recognizes a perception in them that he doesn't see in men like you know he's afraid of sylvia in a way that he is not afraid of brub like this kind of seeingness don't you think there are different women though and he recognizes that there are some women to pray to predate and there are some women who are more powerful and that there are some women to prey, to predate, and there are some women who are more powerful. And then there are the women who are sort of nameless or are, you know, sort of something to prey upon and that these are different kinds of people. And I'm not saying they are, but it feels like he makes that distinction. And I love that he's a lady killer. I feel like that, like it says a couple of times in the novel that he sees himself as a bit of a lady killer or somebody

calls him a lady killer. And that there's that unbelievable dual times in the novel that he sees himself as a bit of a lady killer or somebody calls him a lady killer. And that there's that unbelievable dual meaning to that, that he carries in him. Kind of interesting. I mean, you're talking about the genre. I mean, film noir as a term is only coined by Nino Frank in 1946 and isn't really used about those films until much later. you know, Frank in 1946 and isn't really used about those films until much later. What I think is amazing here is she's subverting the genre before it's even really, I mean, right at the beginning of it coming together. I mean, the usual explanation is that it was post-war, servicemen coming back, you know, the American dream turning sour, darkness, the films got darker,

screwball comedies were replaced by film noir. But the refusal to turn either Sylvia or Laurel into classic femme fatales, you know, who bring about the destruction or near destruction of the man are usually destroyed in themselves is, that's the thing that I think I found kind of exhilarating. There's a very good essay by Megan Abb abbott which is in the nyrb edition of that i believe is in print at the moment she makes two really interesting points in relation to this she points out that the in lots of noir uh the threat to the male protagonist is not women per se, but domesticity. That the man coming out of the war will be tamed and that it's better to kill or be killed

than die in the nuclear family. So that's the first thing. And the second thing she says, she agrees with you, Nora, and John, actually, both of you, and she says noir itself is a response to the Second World War, to men's experience in the Second World War. And this novel is like a female take on that experience. Men who have been happy together during the Second World War,

who know their place, who have a role, are jettisoned into this post-war environment and hughes sets up two alternative paths you have brub on the path of righteousness the cop using many of the same things dicks does his, his strength, his intelligence, but Dix is on the unalternative path. He's a killer. What do you do with PTSD, with male anger, with violence which you have encouraged and groomed when there is no theatre for it? How do you channel it? Where does it go? And she gives you two alternative versions of that, both of which are subsequently dealt with

by female characters who are not merely domestic characters by her. So Sylvia is the domestic, but she's clearly not. You know, she's clearly the person who is instrumental in Dix being arraigned. I think there's something absolutely fascinating about class here as well, because Rob and Sylvia are both sort of upper, upper class. I mean, it's a class of society,

right, in quotation marks, it's obviously not, and Dix, and actually Laurel as well, aren't. And in some ways, I think that, you know, these two men coming back from war, the one who has money, who has, you know, kind of high society has some things that can support him, some formalities, some money, really, and a sense of whatever it is, it can sort of can accept him back into the society and give him a framework to work within and give him the privilege that it takes to perhaps, you know, help him, you know, reassemble a life back from war. Whereas somebody like Dex doesn't have those. He works in a hardware store for his uncle who doles him out, like, you know, tiny checks and keeps him sort of impoverished. And he has to pick up these little bits of a check from the floor when he rips it up. And I think it has to do with, I think it has to

do with what, you know, what you have when you come back, which is something you see in veterans from all sorts of wars, that, you know, those who have money can come back and have some help. That doesn't mean they're happy, but they have help. And those who don't can be abandoned. A crucial thing about Dix, though, right? Let's, you know, let's take him. I mean, I think all the stuff about the war is interesting, but he kills, he kills before he comes back. I mean, he was obviously killing in the war, but he, you know, without perhaps naming the character that he kills, but that's the big and terrifying reveal of the book.

But, you know, so you are dealing with a psychopath. If you're still listening to this, everybody, because you do it in the spoilers, it's also the very end of the book, right? His acknowledgement that that specific murder is the key so what we're going to do is i'm going to so becky you're going to read to us from the beginning of the book in a minute and i am going to first i'm going to read the blurb one of the great privileges john and i always say about ballast is we get to immerse ourselves in the work of one of the authors that we feature and i read several novels by dorothy h Hughes, all of which I enjoyed.

In every case, she's a writer about purgatory. She puts her characters into a room or a town or a train or a car or a place. And she, our lonely place and they are you are with them for the duration of their stay until they get popped out to heaven or hell at the end of the book let's be honest usually hell and every novel I read was different from every other novel written in a different register you know this was by far and away the most, I don't want to say generic, but in a sense, the prose was most like what you would find in a hard-boiled thriller, which lends weight to the idea that she specifically wanted to subvert whatever form she was working in at the time. at the time. So this is the original blurb from the hardback jacket of In a Lonely Place from 1947 and I'm going to ask my fellow publishing professionals to judge this blurb. Let's say you were like Becky in the Oxfam bookshop in 1948 and this book was on the shelf for 50p and she picks it up and she reads the following. He had Mel's apartment and Mel's car

and the use of Mel's charge accounts, those made life comfortable. Once a month he had excitement, gratification and peace, enough to last him for a time while the newspapers headlined another murder. What folly, born of loneliness, drove him to br's. He knew it was folly as soon as he heard what Brub was doing now, but at the same time it amused him. It was a dare, an opportunity to take a chance, for Brub was a cop now, hunting the strangler. Perhaps it would have been all right even so if he had not found Laurel, Laurel who was beauty and comfort and something to lavish tenderness on, and because of whom he ventured forth from that lonely place apart from his fellow men, and so came to disaster. Here is a latter-day crime and punishment,

told from the killer's point of view, as skillful, absorbing, and human a job of storytelling as you will come across in many a day. A bloodhound novel, Dwell, Sloan & Pierce, Inc., 270 Madison Avenue, New York. What do you think? Wow. I mean, how big was that book? Yeah. I mean, did they have it on those flaps that you have to like read and then you keep reading to the back

flap for the rest of the blurb because it's a huge slot it's exactly like that Noria that's exactly what it is yeah that's pretty good I mean I think you know I always assume that the author wrote those if it's the first edition I reckon maybe the author wrote that

maybe the author, you know, latter day crime and punishment, I mean that might be setting it high but you know the courtroom drama as we know is down to Dostoyevsky isn't it the Brothers Karamazov is the first great courtroom drama so there is a kind

of appropriate comparison a lot of people considered crime and punishment a crime novel you know the first the first crime novel why not the first punishment novel yeah exactly so uh why don't we hear some of um Hughes's prose Becky what have you got for us? Well, actually, I have exactly the same bit that John repurposed for his introduction, but so now we can hear it in Dorothy's words. As his head turned, he saw the girl. She was just stepping off the bus. She couldn't see him because he was no more than a figure in the fog and dark. She couldn't know he was drawing her on his mind as on a piece of paper. She was small,

dark haired with a rounded face. She was more than pretty. She was nice looking, a nice girl, sketched in browns, brown hair, brown suit, brown pumps and bag, even a small brown felt hat. He started thinking about her as she was stepping off the bus. She wasn't coming home from shopping, no parcels. She wasn't going to a party, the tailored suit, sensible shoes. She must be coming from work. That meant she descended from the Brentwood bus at this lonely corner every night at, he glanced to the luminous dial of his watch, 7.20. Possibly she'd work late tonight but that could be checked easily. Well probably she was employed at the studio, close at six, an hour to

get home. While he was thinking of her the bus had bumbled away and she was crossing the slant intersection coming directly towards him. Not to him, she didn't know he was there in the high foggy dark. He saw her face again as she passed under the yellow fog light, saw that she didn't like the darkness and fog and loneliness. She started down the California incline. He could hear her heels striking hard on the warped pavement, as if the sound brought her some reassurance. He didn't follow her at once. Actually, he didn't intend to follow her. It was entirely without volition that he found himself moving down the slant, winding walk.

He didn't walk hard, as she did, nor did he walk fast. Yet she heard him coming behind her. He knew she heard him, for her heel struck an extra beat, as if she had half stumbled, and her steps went faster. He didn't walk faster, he continued to saunter, but he lengthened his stride, smiling slightly. She was afraid. The state of California has a coastline almost 1,000 miles long, and within an area larger than that the British Isles has a great diversity of physical characteristics.

Whitman, rising 14,496 feet is the highest peak in the United States. But of all of California's vast and varied industries, perhaps none is so widely known as the entertainment industry. Hollywood, the city of make-believe, is the home of the motion picture. You recognize the names of most of these great studios, which produce by far the largest percentage of the world's celluloid entertainment. So that's a California travelogue film from 1947, the year in which In a Lonely Place was first published. I mean, one of the things that strikes me that this novel does have in common with Chandler is this is an amazing book about LA

how important is sense of place in in a lonely place it's enormously important and the weird thing about the book that I wanted that I don't know if you agree but for a book about LA about a massive city it it barely it's a book it's not really it's a book about the sea it's sort of like occasionally mentions a drive-in or a building or a boulevard that you know rings a bell because we know these places from hollywood movies and from the sort of the sort of myth of it but it's a lonely city and it's a place of lonely dark corners and and this and the sea spray and the beach and the darkness and the mountains and lonesome drives it doesn't feel like a city so it's part of the grit in the book do you think that an an la novel should be called in a lonely place you know for such a populous city one of the one of the the things that the

novel is about becky is how it's possible to be alone, surrounded by X million people. Yeah, I think as well, like he, you feel like Dix has gone to this dark place in his soul that not many people access. And he's also capable of finding the kind of dark parts of LA that, you know, that people aren't. He knows that he has an eye. I mean, I think it's really fascinating that when the police are talking to him about his murders and you know they're saying this is what this guy does and they're like the first one he did it doesn't fit with the others you know he he killed a kind of a dancer from a kind of skid row establishment and then but then he just moved on to you know sort of respectable women in reputable areas and I kind of see that as his realization actually I don't have to haunt the worst parts of this city to find empty places.

I don't have to target women with no friends to find them alone. Like he has this great shark-like instinct for open space. And I think it's actually something to do with what Nora said about that horror of sound and that lulledness that he gets from the sea, that kind of shushing that calm that the sea and the shower and water bring him could we talk a little bit about how those two female protagonists subvert the roles that other writers would have assigned to them so sylvia nicolai and laurel gray one is that would have been characterised as, the former would be characterised as the good wife, and the latter would be characterised as the femme fatale.

What's going on there with those two characters within the framework of this novel? Well, it's so fascinating that there aren't any children in this book. And I think, you know, in a way, you know, women in kind of classic noir, I'm thinking about like The Postman Always Rings Twice as a sort of, you know, if there's a baby going to come or if there's something that, you know, there's that sense of, again of domesticity but in fact they're both angular and complex and and they can they both read him in a way that i think you know kind of undercuts the the usual role of of a woman that's a big question andy i don't know i'm struggling with that one a little bit well i think one of the points of the book is that dick is that dicks reads them wrong yeah yeah that that dicks as your unreliable narrator is presenting one of them to you as as this safe domestic wife and the other to you as this femme fatale and guess what they both outwit him which he can't deal with this is one of the

things that that induces this kind of nervous breakdown near the end of the book because the roles that he is assigned them. Yeah. They're smarter than he is. Yeah. I think as a kind of study of misogyny, it's fascinating. It is. There's this one bit that really stays with me in the kind of the middle of

one of his sorts of altercations with Laurel that isn't violent, where his mind kind of interjects in his thoughts. She ought to be beaten like a rug and then just moves on through his thinking and you're actually like those are there all the time this kind of even if he's not being violent his instinct behind it you know the facade that he's assuming and you're so right Andy that like he isn't doing what he thinks he's doing because right at the end when Sylvia is like I've seen through you I've always seen through you if you have believed him through the novel like every you know he narrates every facial expression every action you know he smiles

with just the right amount of embarrassment like he picks up the beer with just that knack of looking very casual and you know he's so convincing in that in like that kind of facade and you realize that well he can't have been this is a piece by a writer called christine smallwood which i just wanted to run by you this was in the new yorker about 10 years ago and this is i thought this was really great description of what dorothy hughes is doing christine smallwood says our current literary moment is obsessed with autobiography and memoir, but Hughes chose for herself a different challenge. A white woman, she would tell stories about and from the points of view of others,

psychotic men, Spanish men, Native Americans, jazz musicians, fashionable women, soldiers, doctors, the creation of difference itself was her subject. Isn't that great? Her books were widely praised for their atmospheres of fear and suspense and criticized when they reached, as the New York Times said of the fallen sparrow, towards conflict and situations that are rather beyond the usual whodunit scheme. But that was Hughes's point. It is not whodunit but whoness itself that she's after. And by this I don't mean that she asks why. Specific motives are as mulish and as unanswerable as sin. Crime was never Hughes's interest. Evil was.

And to be evil for her is to be intolerant of others, of the very fact of the existence of something outside the self with her poetic powers of description she makes that evil a sickness in the mind and a landscape to be surveyed christine smallwood that is top tier writing but becky like motive right who cares why anything happens in a dorothy hughes book right well i was i was trying to work out one of those kind of you know those elegant things like um you know it's not who done it it's how done it or why you done it or what and like the closest i could get was why is it like you know it's so like, it's so existential. She's thinking about things on the most macro scale possible. It's very Iago, isn't it?

You don't really understand where, I mean, you get clues, but there's no, she doesn't try and psychologise. She doesn't actually subject him. She presents the thought processes and you're, as the reader, you have to figure out your own kind of way. Nora, do you have an extract to read for us? I do. I do, absolutely. So the part I'm going to read comes from right towards the end of the book and he's gone back to where he was when he first watched the little brown girl in Becky's part.

So we're back in the same place. He didn't consciously plan to drive out Wilshire to the sea, but the car was set on its course and the road led to the dark, wet horizon. The fog blew in at 14th Street and he should have turned back then. He didn't. He went on through the opaque cloud until he had passed into the yellow spray that, falling into a pool, marked the Ocean Avenue intersection. He knew then what he was going to do. He swung left and pulled in at the curb by the Palisades Park. Out of the fog light glow, all things became an indistinguishable blur in the night. He left the car. The fog was cool and sweet as he drifted through it, into the park, the benches, the trees assuming shape as he neared them. He walked to the

stone balustrade. He could hear the boom of the breakers far below. He could smell the sea smell and the fog. There was no visibility save for the yellow pools of fog light on the road below and the suggested skyline of the beach houses. There was a soft fog-hung silence broken only by the thump of the water and the far-off cry of the foghorn.

He drifted through the park on quiet feet, looking for the shape of a living thing, of a woman. But he was alone, the living huddled behind closed doors, warming their fears of the night in the reassurance of lighted lamps. He came to the corner that jutted out over the cliffs, to the corner which was the beginning of the California incline. He stood there quietly for a long time, waiting, remembering the night he had stood in that same place almost a month ago, the night he had pretended his hand was a plane swooping through the fog, the night he had seen the little brown girl. He waited without allowing himself to know why. He kept his hands dug into his pockets, and he leaned over the edge of the balustrade, his back to the avenue.

But no bus came to shatter the silence and the fog. There were not even cars abroad, not at this particular time and place. You know what I was thinking? You know, Dick Steele is like a ghost. He's like, he's like, if it weren't for all them murders, what he'd done. But he's like, he's like, it's like he died in the war well he's got the living or inside and he's already on the outside he's already dead he's not the living yeah yeah yeah and the fog he's ghostly in the fog once again on backlisted a life-enhancing uh listen for everybody um i i think there's a i think there's a really interesting question it is just a question whether hughes is limited or emancipated

by being thought of as a genre writer that she has a readership is probably down to being seen as one of the great writers in her genre that she doesn't have a bigger readership is probably down to being seen as one of the great writers in her genre that she doesn't have a bigger readership is down to her being seen as one of the great writers in her genre discuss amongst yourselves listeners because we don't have time um becky anything you would like to add before we go well i mean actually what i was going to say was essentially along the same lines which is that question you know, why is she neglected in the way she is? Why is a writer with her powers not better known? And, you know, it's interesting, because, you know, I didn't know much about her as a person. And I, you know, so for this, I did my homework, and I went and looked her up. And there's actually very little about her. She doesn't have an entry in the American Dictionary of Biography. doesn't have an entry in the American dictionary of biography and you know and you look at what we do know about her life and she essentially you know she she was what we now call I think as like she was sort of sandwiched in between caring for her ill and elderly mother and her

children and she just stopped writing you know in a way that uh you know a male writer with her success and popularity simply wouldn't have had to and you know and she came back with The Expendable Mountain. It was extraordinary. And, you know, what a way to finish your novel writing career. But, you know, I do, I suppose it's less of a question and just more of a reflection that I think, you know, she is a victim of domestic circumstance,

maybe the domesticity that is so often floating around in these type of novels as something bad. And I think it was bad for Hughes. You can't see Dick Steele in the film giving up writing for 10 years and bashing people in the face, can you? He wouldn't be putting aside the career for anything or anyone,

which is all part of the thing you're talking about. And the film was obviously, I mean, Gloria Graham was the wife of Nicholas Ray and their marriage broke up during the filming of that film. So it's about all kinds of other things as well, the film, I think. Well, let's give Gloria Graham the last word.

I lived a few weeks while you loved me. Goodbye, Dick. That's the massive spoiler for the end of the film, but oh well, you came this far, everybody. John, wrap us up. And there we must leave the strange and damaged world of dixon steel huge thanks to becky and nora for introducing us to the far ahead of its time over of dorothy b hughes to nikki birch for her mastery of making remote recording sound

up close and personal and to unbound for all the scotch and splashes you can download all 141 previous episodes of batlisted, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at backlisted.fm. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook and now in sound and pictures on Instagram too. You can also show your love directly by supporting our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. We aim to survive without paid-for advertising, and your generosity helps us to do that. All patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early.

And for the price of two steaks at Simon's Drive-In, lot listeners get two extra lot-listed a month. Our version of an LA beachfront cafe where the coffee's hot and black and the tunes, books, and movie recommendations are all served to go. Lot listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation and this week's batch are kaz mitchell thank you very much hall allison but i can't help thinking that must be allison hall

and stan van den oort and a very special thank you to hillary murray hill a guest back in 2016 on episode 27 jane gardens long way to verona and now an official member of the guild of master storytellers thank you hillary and expect to be regularly festooned with tokens of our deep appreciation for your generous and also we would like to thank uh nora perkins and becky brown because in a glimpse behind the curtain of how we make Backlisted, the answer is at the last minute, everybody. And so we're really, really, really grateful to Becky and Nora for helping us out and make this show. How did it differ from the one we recorded a year ago, would you say, guys? You have a much fancier microphone.

I think I'm 20% less afraid. 20%, afraid 20 only 20 you've got nothing to be afraid of it was fantastic and what an amazing book an amazing writer so thanks very much everyone and we'll see you next time if you prefer to listen to backlisted without adverts you can sign up to our patreon it's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Lock Listed, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.