Review by Booklist Review
Best known for In a Lonely Place, the quintessential postwar noir, Hughes also tinkered with other forms of crime fiction; here, in this 1945 novel, she tackles one of the genre's most rigid conventions: murder on a train. Forget the Orient Express and an all-seeing Poirot figure solving the unsolvable; Hughes upsets our expectations by having the victim, a famous Hollywood actress, Kitten Agnew, announce in the first chapter that she is afraid she will be killed before the cross-country train reaches New York. Not only that, but Kitten also tells us early on that her killer will be sexual predator and egomaniacal producer Viv Spender. Scattered among the first-class cabins are also Spender's loyal assistant, the starlet whom Spender sees as the successor to Kitty, an alcoholic war correspondent, a dissolute band leader, and a failed screenwriter. Hughes digs deeply into the inner lives of the group, finding darkness in every corner; and, while she is guilty of some overwriting in the many interior monologues, she brings something new and often slightly perverse to the table. Another fine addition to Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics series.--Bill Ott Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
First published in 1940, this delightful entry in Otto Penzler's new American Mystery Classics series was the debut of MWA Grand Master Hughes (1904-1993), best known today for In a Lonely Place, which became a film starring Humphrey Bogart. After a brief stint as an actress in Hollywood, Griselda Satterlee has returned to Manhattan to pursue a career as a fashion designer. One night, while returning to her ex-husband's East Side apartment, where she is staying, she is accosted by two frightening young men who demand that she give them the "blue marble." What follows is nonstop action, with menace and daring exploits bursting through the smooth veneer of upper-class life. Students of cultural history will enjoy stepping back into a New York where gentlemen wear top hats when going out on the town, and ladies, when hastily packing to escape from psychopaths, remember to include in their suitcases "hats with tissue paper crumpled in their hollows." That Hughes was a poet is clear from the jangling rhythm of her prose. Readers new to this forgotten classic are in for a treat. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A movie star-turned-designer gets swept into a murderous hunt for a precious gem in this reissued 1940s thriller.Griselda Satterlee (not, thank God, her screen name) has decided to give up the screen for the comparatively quieter life of fashion design. During a trip to New York, which will reunite her with her two sisters and find her staying in her ex-husband's digs near Madison Avenue, Griselda returns home one night only to be accosted by the Montefierrow twins, denizens of the society page, back in town after a dozen years on the Continent, and as thoroughly, chillingly, cold-bloodedly homicidal a pair as has appeared in any thriller. The twins insist that Griselda's ex is in possession of a rare and ancient gem, which they call the blue marble, and insist she knows where it is. Her own insistence that she has no idea spurs the twins to a series of vicious murders, made even more horrible by the alternately gleeful and bored participation of Griselda's conscienceless, psychopathic younger sister. Some of the murders are committed to extract information and some just to tidy up loose ends. But as with everything else in the rather intricate plot, the particulars drop away and the motive, far more than obtaining the marble, becomes the desire for mayhem and casual sadism, all of it executed as casually as ordering another round. Nearly 80 years after its initial publication, there is still nothing like Hughes' (The Expendable Man, 1963, etc.) debut novel. The 1940s New York setting, the characters who drink like fish and dress for dinner and take cabs to go a blockbecause, really, who walks?give the book the sophisticated luster of romantic comedy. But it's as if a Lubitsch movie kept being periodically taken over by David Lynch. It remains funny only now we're being asked to laugh at murder and threats and oddball sociopaths. And so the book becomes genuinely nightmarish, at times close to suffocating.The debut by one of the great American suspense writers will suck you in even as it makes you keep asking, "Did I just read that?" Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
