Mystery Review: Ride the Pink Horse fits as a mystery, a noir, or even a hard-boiled detective story, but with a distinct difference. Dorothy B. Hughes doesn't focus on plot, action, or suspense. Instead she spends much of the novel recreating the setting, the ambiance and feel of the Fiestas de Santa Fe. She also describes the growth and evolution of a young, bigoted, and damaged criminal. He's a stranger in a strange land, a fish out of water, and he's reluctantly absorbed into the people, history, and landscape of the region. Hughes slowly establishes the complex interplay of the four main characters and is even slower to build suspense or tension. She's working with myths and archetypes. The story is much different than readers have come to expect from Hughes in novels such as Dread Journey (1945), In a Lonely Place (1947), or The Expendable Man (1963). Those novels were written with a subtle awareness of race and class in America, but that awareness is given center stage in Ride the Pink Horse and compassion is the main player. "It's good, for us to see how other people live. We get awfully narrow in our own little lives. We get thinking we're so all-fired important that nobody else counts. We forget that everyone counts, that everybody on this earth counts just as much as we do." Not what was on offer in Hammett, Cain, and Chandler. In Ride the Pink Horse thoughts and emotions, human interactions, are as important as guns and fists. There is a reasonable amount of drink, however. A well-written but surprising and thoughtful ride. [4★]
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