So Blue Marble

November 1, 2019
Best known for In a Lonely Place (1947), 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 about 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)