Noir Angst: Dorothy B. Hughes's Dread Journey

Abstract

AbstractStructured like Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) around a three‐day train journey, Dorothy B. Hughes's novel titled Dread Journey (1945) explores the noir experience of Angst as a condition linked to the erosion of moral absolutes in a postwar culture beguiled by Hollywood's regime of cinematographic illusion. Her eighth narrative, though not as well known as Hughes's In a Lonely Place (1947) and The Expendable Man (1963), plumbs a distinctly modern malaise identified by the philosophers associated with existential psychology. Eliotic references to the passengers' “atavistic fear of the wasteland” as the train plunges through the vast emptiness of the American Southwest en route from Los Angeles to New York reinforce a mounting sense of ontological disconnection. When contextualized by Hughes's The So Blue Marble (1940), The Blackbirder (1943), and The Davidian Report (1952), Dread Journey demonstrates that its author was keenly attuned to what W. H. Auden famously termed the “Age of Anxiety.”