Murder!

Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place
Tana French, The Witch Elm

Both novels feature a troubled young male protagonist and murder(s) by the same technique. Both explore the terrain of "toxic masculinity." Hughes's book, first published in 1947, is one of the best noir crime novels I have read. It is even better than her 1963 The Expendable Man, and that's saying something. Whereas Tana French's latest is, in my view, her weakest novel yet, rave reviews notwithstanding. But if you are a fan– as I am– you will probably read it anyway, so I'll try to avoid any spoilers.

In The Witch Elm, as is standard in a French thriller, a messy Irish family and deep psychological trauma form the backdrop for murder and nastiness. As usual, the past is never dead– it's not even past. The novel has its gripping moments, but I found the writing more ham-handed than her norm, and the first-person protagonist psychologically unconvincing. Big themes about luck and fate are at play here, including moral luck, whether we make our own luck, and so forth. But this is not Dostoevsky, this is a crime novel! And the ultimate crime: just when it feels like we should have entered the denouement, French drops a farfetched plot element and drags the whole thing out for another hundred pages or so.

Dorothy B. Hughes, a deadly efficient writer, would have written The Witch Elm in about half the pages. It was interesting but hardly surprising to learn from Wikipedia that Hughes's first published book was a book of poetry; her terse prose has a music to it, though it never resorts to the pretentious "hard-boiled" noir style.

Once he’d had happiness but for so brief a time; happiness was made of quicksilver, it ran out of your hand like quicksilver. There was the heat of tears suddenly in his eyes and he shook his head angrily. He would not think about it, he would never think of that again. It was long ago in an ancient past. To hell with happiness. More important was excitement and power and the hot stir of lust. Those made you forget. They made happiness a pink marshmallow.

In these few short sentences you learn nearly as much about the twisted psyche of Dix Steele as you do about Toby Hennessy in Tana French's entire book. Send a few dollars NYRB's way and get the beautiful print edition of In a Lonely Place with Megan Abbott's insightful afterword about Hughes, noir, and masculinity. It fits comfortably in your hands, which is where it will likely stay until you have finished it.