Xmas is coming. You all know that. You might have a family member or friend who you want to get something for but they have everything. You go hurtling toward the shops and web browsers and cant find anything. You need something thrilling, that cant be put down. Like the story set on a train written by Dorothy B Hughes. Its a masterful thriller called DREAD JOURNEY.

Hollywood big-shot Vivien Spender is a man who wants to get his masterpiece on screen. This is a film adaptation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. He once found a face to play the female lead role of Clavdia Chauchat. He’s spent years literally grooming starlets. None ever get up to the mark and are discarded to find a fresher face. These rejected women aren’t all simply walking off. Some are removed from the world of pictures. Others end up at the end of the bottle and one ends up dead. A suspected suicide but some think it is worse. Kitten Agnew was the last possible star. She is to be discarded for another younger model but she will not go out without fighting for it. But will Viv let her off so easily? Or will he go back to how he dealt with the last, difficult star…

Before Me To and the Hollywood uncovering of sexual abuse, has a ringing undertone in this hardboiled delight of a novel. Hughes, known today for IN A LONELY PLACE and RIDE THE PINK HORSE (out now on Arrow), was a master at what I call, compact control. Its a way of writing that ramps up tensions by allowing multiple voices to compact their version of events into a seamless narrative chain. So the story pivots on a train journey from sunny LA to windy Chicago. Mr. Spender is on this train journey and Kitty senses something is amiss. The new Ingénue, Gratia is as naïve and wide eyed as any. She is also equipped with a sense of horror at the world of Hollywood. As the train barrels through America’s heartland, its the sense of malice, misogyny and Hollywood excess that drips onto the page. Hughes channels the tension with an acceleration towards an ‘inescapable finale’ (as the publisher says). It is rare for marketing to get it right but here in its pounding set up and pay off, return on reader investment, is a novel as relevant today as on release.

Now the other selling point here is that this has not been available for over twenty years. Yes, it has not been around because of licence issues and the problem that Hughes has a pivotal work (a nice way of saying the print labels have a guaranteed return on investment). DREAD JOURNEY is amazing. Read it!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dread-Journey-Dorothy-B-Hughes/dp/1613161468