The Expendable Man (Classic edition)

by Dorothy B Hughes

Order This Book

Napkin Selection The Far Cry
A Well Full of Leaves

£12.00

Pre-order

Quantity

Please note that although you may receive an email saying the book has shipped, it will not reach you until around Thursday April 17th 2025, which is publication date.

AFTERWORD BY DOMINIC POWER
344pp
ISBN: 9781906462611

‘Across the tracks there was a different world. The long and lonely country was the color of sand. The horizon hills were haze-black; the clumps of mesquite stood in dark pools of their own shadowing. But the pools and the rim of dark horizon were discerned only by conscious seeing, else the world was all sand, brown and tan and copper and pale beige.’

A young doctor named Hugh Densmore is driving his mother’s white Cadillac along the highway from L.A. to Phoenix on his way to his niece’s wedding. Out in the desert, fifteen miles from the nearest town, he spots a shadow lurking under a lone tree: a hitchhiker. She seems to be in some sort of trouble. He agrees to give her a lift, but even after he drops her at the bus station, why is he the one looking over his shoulder? And then, a few days later, her dead body is found in a canal….

Dorothy B. Hughes, a contemporary of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, first showed her flair for mid-century noir in novels like In a Lonely Place (1947), but in The Expendable Man (1963) she powerfully evokes the social, moral and racial tensions of the period to reveal the dark reality of life in the American South-West for both women and men.

Also available as a Persephone Grey.

Cover painting

Read What Readers Say

Sara Peretsky, ‘The Guardian’

Today Dorothy B Hughes is remembered for ‘In a Lonely Place’ (1947) but my personal favourite is ‘The Expendable Man’ (1963). Hughes lived in New Mexico and her love of its bleak landscape comes through in carefully painted details. She knows how to use the land sparingly, so it creates mood. The narrative shifts from the landscape to the doctor, who reluctantly picks up a teen hitchhiker. When she’s found dead a day later, he’s the chief suspect, and the secrets we know he’s harbouring from the first page are slowly revealed. Hughes’s novels crackle with menace. Like a Bauhaus devotee, she understood that in creating suspense, less is more. Insinuation, not graphic detail, gives her books an edge of true terror. She’s the master we all could learn from.

She Reads Novels (via Instagram)

I highly recommend reading 'The Expendable Man’. I was completely gripped from beginning to end and couldn’t bear to put the book down until I knew what was going to happen to Hugh. There’s an element of mystery-solving to the novel, but it’s much more than a straightforward crime story. A few chapters into the book, there’s a twist – or maybe revelation is a better word to use – that changed the way I felt about what I had read so far and showed me that I had made an unfair assumption without even being aware that I had made it. It was so cleverly done and provided answers to some of the things I’d been wondering about as I read those earlier chapters. I also loved the author’s beautifully written descriptions of the landscape.

Maxim Jakubowski, ‘The Guardian’

This reissue of [Dorothy B. Hughes’s] final novel, first published in 1963, is most welcome, an exhilarating no-holds-barred semi-political noir thriller denouncing racial abuse in the American southwest. A doctor picks up an attractive teenage female hitchhiker and runaway on an Arizona road and begins a slow, systematic descent into an American hell. It took real guts to write [this novel] at the time of the Goldwater presidential campaign, Governor Wallace’s declarations and much simmering racism. The book still grips like a vice, and hasn’t dated one bit.

Categories: Classics