This is a timely reissue for one of the great American noir novels of the 1940s. Hughes started out as a poet and there's a lyrical feel to every page of this strangely compelling story. Sailor, a tough gangster from Chicago, arrives in a small, desert town in New Mexico. He's on the trail of his boss, a corrupt senator who's set up the murder of his wife to look like a botched robbery. Sailor's only objective is to find him, blackmail him and then get the hell out of there; but when a Chicago cop called Mac arrives in town, things take a new and unexpected direction. Mac's allegiance is unclear and it is down to Sailor to try and make sense of an increasingly nightmarish situation. Set against the garish backdrop of the town's fiesta, Ride the Pink Horse offers a unique synergy of magic realism and Golden Age noir. Filmed in 1947 by Robert Montgomery, it predates by some years the bleak landscape of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (itself adapted from a 1956 pulp novel by Whit Masterson), and it taps into the same rich vein of dislocation and claustrophobia as contemporaneous fantasy writer Ray Bradbury's haunting New Mexico short stories. Not to be missed.
