By Steven Nester
No good deed goes unpunished in Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1963 novel, The Expendable Man, a clean and spare noir work that stretches plot boundaries with an interesting twist. This straight-talking book combines a police procedural, a fish-out-of-water thriller, and psychological suspense with something unexpected that’s germane in any era, but especially the one we’re living through now: It isn’t until almost a quarter of the way into this tale that it’s revealed that Hughes’ main character, UCLA medical intern Dr. Hugh Densmore, is Black. His kindness has gotten him into the jam of a lifetime, requiring him to fight (with kid gloves, unfortunately) racist police and Jim Crow laws
in order to find justice and perhaps save his own skin in this how-it-was portrayal of U.S. racism during the early 1960s.Some might label this a trick novel, because Densmore’s race isn’t revealed early on. However, Hughes’ stratagem deftly sets the hook, drawing readers into the circumstances of the crime at hand first, rather than having them focus on social issues.
Densmore is a model citizen, and the author assiduously makes him appealing and sympathetic. Intelligent and sensitive, he displays actionable empathy when he picks up a young white hitchhiker named Iris Croom in the Southern California desert. She says she’s on her way to her mother’s house in Phoenix. Densmore, it so happens, is bound for the Arizona capital as well, to attend his niece’s wedding. It doesn’t take long for him to discover he’s being played by Iris—if that’s even her real name. Bringing her from California to Arizona would be a violation of the Mann Act (or White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910), and as a successful and decent man from a good family, this kind deed might jeopardize Densmore’s career and bring shame to his relatives. It could even incite violence from others.
Iris’ “badly bleached hair” and general aura of cheapness tag her as a runaway. Densmore might be a nice guy, but he’s no shrinking violet, and he patiently picks apart her brazen story. “You’re a practiced liar,” he tells her. “I manage,” she replies with unabashed confidence. After that he takes her to a bus station in California, buys her a ticket to ride, and says goodbye. Checking in at a local motel, he observes that the desk clerk “didn’t up the price for him.” This should set readers’ minds a-wondering, expecting some clarification to come.
As for Iris, she cashes in the ticket; and like a bad penny, she shows up the next day, standing a few steps beyond the Arizona state line—far enough to make the Mann Act a nonissue—and obviously waiting for Densmore to drive by. Begrudgingly, he gives her a lift the rest of the way to Phoenix. State border agents, though, witness him with an underage white girl, and one of those officers (“the kind who’d like to make something of Hugh’s picking up a dirty blond teenager”) hears her say his name and notes the plate number on his white Cadillac. Calculating and resourceful, Croom knows Densmore is a physician, and her ulterior motives are revealed when she stalks him to his motel to ask for an abortion. He promptly sends her away … only to read soon after in the local paper that she has died. And then it’s game on! Densmore must find the abortionist who ultimately treated Croom, a person he hopes will lead him to the killer (if in fact they are two different people), before police track him down and make Densmore’s family gathering an uncomfortable affair.
Densmore’s fear of being linked to Iris grows as he begins to investigate her passing. It doesn’t, in fact, take long for the cops to connect him to Croom, and the two Phoenix detectives working that case want nothing more than to wrap it up with Densmore as the convenient fall guy. Not afraid to intimidate him, they call him “n—” to his face and in front of others, and use every dirty trick they know to implicate him. When word comes that the cause of Iris’ demise has yet to be determined, it gives him a bit of breathing room to work.
Meanwhile, Densmore is also hot on the trail of Ellen Hamilton, a beautiful and intelligent black woman attending his niece’s nuptials. The daughter of a prominent Washington, D.C., judge, she has a brilliant future planned for herself, and finds Densmore promising. He tells her his story of Iris Coom; she believes him and appeals to her father to give him help. The judge, in turn, arranges for Skye Houston, a well-connected Phoenix lawyer, to represent Densmore. A white man with political aspirations, Houston knows a high-profile case will help with his eventual gubernatorial run and is quite up-front about it. In the changing times of the early 1960s, it seems that having a black client wouldn’t hurt his prospects one bit. But Skye is no panderer; he is merely a realist. He introduces Densmore to the world of tit for tat, where the content of a man’s character (to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr.) is more important than the color of his skin. Skye has found the place where black and white can meet on a professional level, and he asks Densmore to join him there and perhaps cut a legal deal.
(Above) On the left is the 1963 Avon paperback edition of Hughes’ novel. On the right is the 1965 Mayflower Dell edition. At the top of this piece is shown the 1963 Random House hardcover front.
Skye waives his attorney’s fee, saying he’ll “take out in trade” any medical services he might need further down the road. Although that exchange is presented as a joke, Skye is serious. What else is serious here is Densmore’s concern regarding the attraction he detects between Houston and Ellen, a sensual magnetism that’s also a metaphor for finding common ground between races. Skye is “tanned far darker than Ellen,” her “skin like golden sand.” And the last name Hamilton—it’s impossible to overlook the connotations of that. Could Ellen be the progeny of America’s sexually prolific, Caribbean-born first secretary of the treasury? It’s the kind of tease and torment that leaves readers with the vague thrill that there’s more to this story than they’ll ever know.
Dorothy B. Hughes (1904-1993) was a journalist and author, The Expendable Man being her 14th and final novel. As a native of Kansas City, Missouri, she was probably no stranger to the extent of Jim Crow intolerances. As the United States began a massive cultural shift in the 1950s and ’60s, her inclination as a writer seemed to be to record current events as fiction, perhaps for a more dramatic and human effect. The happy ending in this book is that more than justice is done for Densmore; but as for the big picture, the work is just beginning. Dr. King looms large over this book, 1963 being the year he led protests to bring attention to segregation in Birmingham, Alabama—demonstrations that marked the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Hughes doesn’t spank readers with the theme of racial injustice and redemption, but allows her characters to act it out, making their hopes and humanity carry the message.
The author might be disappointed to know that while change comes, it does so slowly and with resistance from unexpected sources. A conversation between Densmore and Ellen perhaps best sums up how both sides of the skin-color line need to work together. Densmore asks Ellen about her romantic interest in Skye, which she confirms. Could you have ended up with him instead of me, he wants to know. “If he hadn’t been white,” she admits. Ellen goes on to say, “It’s too soon. I’m not that strong.” There was much more work to be done in this area in the 1960s, and many racial advancements still remain incomplete or are under attack today. In her fiction, though, Hughes succeeded in crossing the color line decades ago, beginning the task of bringing black and white together to make one shade.
READ MORE: “On the World’s Finest Female Noir Writer, Dorothy B. Hughes,” by Sarah Weinman (Los Angeles Review of Books).
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