The Expendable Man Author:Dorothy B. Hughes ?It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do — to a presumably educated, civilized man.? And Hugh Denismore, — a young doctor driving his mother?s Cadillac from Los Angeles — to Phoenix is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged, — would seem to have the world at his feet. Then why does the — sight of a few redneck teenagers... more » disconcert him so? Why is
he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the
desert highway? And why, when she is discovered, dead, in
Arizona, is he the first person the police suspect?
Dorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia
Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like In a
Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse she exposed a seething
discontent underneath the veneer of 20th-century prosperity.
With The Expendable Man, first published in 1963, Hughes
upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver
a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the