In the film, Steele is wrongly suspected of killing a cloakroom attendant who works at the restaurant he frequents, but he is under suspicion because of his manifest propensity for violence. Hughes’s novel In a Lonely Place, published in 1947 and adapted, with considerable alterations, into a 1950 movie starring Humphrey Bogart as a Hollywood screenwriter and Gloria Grahame as his lover, who can’t quite rid herself of the suspicion that he’s a murderer. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place and the cultural perception of a link between returned veterans and criminal behavior.Īmong the most disturbing “upside-down” cases of postwar noir is Dixon Steele, the serial-killer protagonist of Dorothy B. In the following passage, she examines Dorothy B. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D.
