Realigning Literary Noir: Dorothy B. Hughes's Ride the Pink Horse and The Expendable Man

Whatever their differences, canonical hard-boiled and noir American crime fiction revolves predominantly around white males. Critical discourse on this corpus has by and large passed over its dominant focus on white men. A notable exception is Megan Abbott's monograph titled The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity and Urban Space in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir, which appeared before the published ten crime novels (as of 2021) narrated from a female perspective. Nowhere in her study, though, does Abbott mention Dorothy B. Hughes who, writing during the same era as Jim Thompson and David Goodis, was in the vanguard of female authors...