The Expendable Man

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Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1963 novel opens with Dr. Hugh Densmore driving his mother’s white Cadillac through the desert of southeastern California. Hugh, who is completing his residency at UCLA Medical Center, is on his way to his parents’ house in Phoenix to attend his sister’s wedding.

Driving through the night, he spies a lone figure stirring beneath a tree in the desert outside the town of Indio. He stops to check on the person, a girl of fifteen or so named Iris Croom. She tells him she’s trying to get to Phoenix. He gives her a ride to Blythe, near the Arizona border, buys her a bus ticket from there to Phoenix and bids her goodbye.

Hugh spends the night at a motel, and when he crosses into Arizona the next morning, he finds the girl waiting for him at the inspection station. He drives her to Phoenix and drops her off at the bus station, again thinking he’s seen the last of her.

Hugh joins his family for the beginning of a weekend of celebrations. His sister introduces him to Ellen Hamilton, a beautiful young woman from a prestigious family in Washington, DC, to whom he is instantly attracted. Hugh is only a year or so away from embarking on his career, and his meeting Ellen should mark the beginning of the next chapter in his life.

Hugh returns to his motel late in the evening to find Iris once again. She tells him she’s in trouble and asks him to perform an abortion as a shady young man watches from his car nearby. Hugh refuses and the girl leaves.

The following day, local newspapers report her body was found floating in a canal in Scottsdale. Her death was the result of either a botched abortion, or abortion followed by deliberate murder.

Hugh knows right away he is in trouble. He’s black and the girl is white. The fact that he drove her from Southern California to Arizona, an act he performed out of good conscience and a sense of social responsibility, will become an indictment in the eyes of the law. Iris’ murderer is likely the young man who got her pregnant, the shadowy figure who was waiting in the car outside the motel when she asked him for an abortion.

What follows is a harrowing account of a man trying to prove his innocence against a system that is not willing to believe anything he says and that would be happy to pin the crime on him, regardless of his innocence. Hugh fights to keep his troubles secret from his family. He doesn’t want to ruin his sister’s wedding. He also knows that, even if he is acquitted of all crimes, the mere accusation of having performed an abortion will be enough to ruin his career.

After the wedding dinner, two homicide detectives appear at Hugh’s motel to question him. They claim to be acting on anonymous tip. Hugh knows the tipster must be Iris’s boyfriend and murderer, but he cannot convince the cops to investigate that angle of the case. As far as they’re concerned, the black suspect is the guilty suspect, and there’s no need to look further.

Detective Venner is a particularly nasty character, an outright racist who continually baits and humiliates Hugh Densmore, trying to get him to snap so he can arrest him and beat him. Ellen Hamilton, who is both gentle and strong, becomes Hugh’s stalwart ally, using her judicial connections (her father is a judge) to find a good defense attorney.

While the action in The Expendable Man unfolds on a deeply personal level between Hugh, Ellen, the police, and attorney Skye Houston, the forces propelling the action are all social. Hugh is battling against the taboo of abortion which, in 1963, was illegal and shameful, associated with the lowest elements of society. He’s battling against the racism of the police, who are not willing to believe the truth of his account; against the press, which loves a lurid crime story with a sympathetic victim and an unsympathetic villain, even when it has to bend the truth to portray victim and villain in the desired light; and against the public, which eagerly accepts the guilt of a black man, even when he’s innocent. This book is hard to read because the injustice is so palpable and so entrenched, and because the people working to uphold the injustice are so clearly awful.

Hughes’ most famous book, In a Lonely Place, was notable not only for its intimate portrayal of the main character’s psychopathic thoughts, but also for the strength and resourcefulness of its female characters. Hugh is a much more sympathetic character than Dix Steele, but we get to see the inner workings of his mind just as clearly. Ellen’s intelligence, resourcefulness and determination fit right in the mold of Laurel and Sylvia from In a Lonely Place.

This excellent and deeply suspenseful thriller captures the tensions of an inflection point in American history, near the beginning of the civil rights movement, as America began to expose and try to correct longstanding social wrongs. In The Expendable Man, the drama plays out on a painful personal level, and the forces of prejudice and injustice seem to have a ready answer to every assertion of truth. This was the last novel Hughes wrote, and it’s a good one.