Dorothy Hughes’ pioneering 1947 noir novel reads as fresh as it must have done when it was first published. Dix Steele—liar, con artist, and worse—lands in L.A. after the war, subletting the garden apartment of an offstage acquaintance, when he decides to look up his Army Air Force buddy, Brub Nicolai, now a police detective. The book follows the two over the course of a few months, as women’s bodies begin turning up strangled. Hughes writes from inside the mind of Dix Steele, slowly building his tortured perspective of the world: his ennui with his post-flying existence, his financial desperation, his disdain for Brub’s domesticity, but especially his anger and suspicion of women—like Brub’s wife Sylvia—who seem to know more about him than he knows himself, and certainly more than he wants them to know. It’s a tense and delicate portrait of a male predator, but one that still somehow provoked the reader’s sympathy occasionally. The book is actually much better than the film by the same name, but Bogart does an excellent job of embodying the psyche of a man who blames everyone around him for what ails him.