Ride the Pink Horse

By: Dorothy B. Hughes

Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki

Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's Summary

During Fiesta, three desperate men converge in a perilous New Mexico town.

It takes four days for Sailor to travel to New Mexico by bus. He arrives broke, sweaty, and ready to get what's his. It's the annual Fiesta, and the locals burn an effigy of Zozobra so that their troubles follow the mythical character into the fire. But for former senator Willis Douglass, trouble is just beginning.

Sailor was Willis' personal secretary when his wife died in an apparent robbery gone wrong. Only Sailor knows it was Willis who ordered her murder, and he's agreed to keep his mouth shut in exchange for little bit of cash. On Sailor's tail is a cop who wants the senator for more than a payoff. As Fiesta rages on, these three men will circle one another in a dance of death, as they chase truth, money, and revenge.

©2014 Dorothy B. Hughes (P)2014 Skyboat Media

Great reading of a great noir novel

Rudnicki's voice is absolutely perfect for a noir novel like this. The story is told in the third person but from the point of view of a Chicago tough guy trying to take care of some business in Santa Fe, the town where he's out of his element. Because Dorothy Hughes wrote in short, crisp sentences, it is very easy to catch every word and every thought in the Audible version. The book is gripping and builds suspense even though a lot of the time the main character is just sort of hanging around. Highly recommended for fans of such authors as James Cain, Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett.

A Crook at a Crossroads

The entire story takes place in an unnamed southwestern town, a crossroads where our protagonist Sailor is offered an alternative to the plan that brought him there. The tension – and few noir writers were better at creating physical, mental, and even spiritual tension than Dorothy B. Hughes – rises as his moment of choice draws nearer.

Throughout, the writing – from descriptions of landscapes and rooms to inner thoughts – is stunningly vivid and humanely perceptive. Though a familiar story of a crook at a moral crossroads, it is by no means pat or predictable. And Stefan Rudnicki’s performance is just about flawless.

One of my absolute favorites!

I read this book awhile back and loved it then. Listening to it now with the very talented Stefan Rudnicki narrating I love it all over again. Great fiction noir, so well written! ☺️👍🏼

Ride the pink horse

I really wanted to like this story, but it was confusing and vague. The author carried the mysterious actions too far, to the point of being difficult to understand.

Atmospheric, slow-moving, hypnotic

I found In a Lonely Place powerful and unsettling, and have always loved noir set in the 40s, but had only read one Hughes, so gave this a try. For me, it started slowly, and unfolded even more slowly. But, like the main character, surrounded by revellers while he goes about his dark and solitary business, I found myself trapped in the surreal fiesta town in which the book is set, entranced by Hughes's evocative writing and, it must be said, by the resonant, deep, initially hard to adjust to, but after a short while, compelling narrator's voice.

The voice of the narrator is so muscular and vibrant it initially threatened to distract from Hughes's mood-setting, but I soon found the actor's voice as compelling as the writing. There is something of Steinbeck in her sympathetic writing of Mexican paisanos and there are echos of Hemingway in her style sometimes, not surprising, perhaps, given she was writing this in 1946, I think.

Her use of the same word twice in succeeding sentences, or even in the same sentence, for example, which initially jarred a bit but I grew to accept and then expect and even find oddly comforting in the repetition.

The protagonist, Sailor's, view of his own mission as an inevitably successful one is so at odds with his apparent incompetence - unable even to find a hotel bed and having to sleep out in the park - that there is some comedy layered into the tragic.

The good cop, Mac, whose choice of clothes is intended to make him blend in and not be noticed - bobbly hat and waste sash, which all the fiesta goers dress up in, but not Sailor - seems blissfully unaware of the comic effect of the hat on Sailor, who grew up with him on the rough side of Chicago. And the Pancho character is richly comic as well as providing a trouble-free alien puzzle to Sailor's troubled central character.

But the lightness of the comic touches is just the odd swirl of cream in an otherwise noir mood - as you'd expect - of the whole. The motif of Sailor's right hand being always clamped on the gun in his pocket throughout the book wore a little thin for me, but did add tension, particularly to some of the periods of longueurs when he is tramping around and the story's wheels seem to be spinning.

Loneliness, solitude, being an outsider - as in her more famous book, In a Lonely Place - is the fate of the transgressor at the centre of her stories. Sailor's occasional panic attacks at his lack of connection to anyone or anything around him bring this to the fore. Hughes writes literary noir, rather than pulp noir. She was a fine and under-rated writer.