Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1947 novel, In a Lonely Place, is one of my favorite crime novels and one of my favorite films of all time. And yet I have never ventured to read more of her work (though I have seen the adaptation of her 1946 novel, Ride the Pink Horse). I’ve had her final novel, 1963’s The Expendable Man, on my shelf pretty much since NYRB Classics released their edition of it back in 2012. I’m so glad I finally sat down to read it, and I’m once again grateful for #NYRBWomen24 for ensuring this was on my reading calendar this year.

Much like In a Lonely Place this is a crime novel where we follow a guilty mind — or, at least, what appears to be a guilty mind for the first few chapters. As the story starts, a young doctor named Hugh Denismore is driving his mother’s Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix, where his family lives. When he gets to Indio, California — a town a couple of hours from the Arizona border — he stops for some refreshment, and he just seems deeply uncomfortable as he tries to keep a low profile. He carries on his journey and gets a little ways out into the desert where he sees a young girl hitchhiking. He just about drives on without picking her up. We get the sense that it’s because he is wary of some kind of legal trouble if he picks her up. Is this a man on the run? Is he, like our protagonist in In a Lonely Place, a criminal trying to hide within a normal life?

Alas, Hugh picks her up. Shortly after he gets to Phoenix, just when he feels safe from any repercussions of picking her up, the worst thing happens. She is found dead, and someone in the shadows is pointing at Dr. Denismore. The local police are only too happy to have him as their prime suspect. He could see it coming from a mile away.

He was the wrong man to have played Samaritan, and he’d known it, known it there on the road and in every irreversible moment since.

Why is Hugh the wrong man to play Samaritan? Why does he “wonder if he would ever be cleansed of his innocent guilt”?

The Expendable Man is a great book is about getting us into the shoes of an innocent man who, nevertheless, has to carefully navigate a world where he’s always a target, and any minimal excuse could be enough to completely upend his life.