“Total privacy”

In public:

Dorothy B. Hughes, The Expendable Man (1963).

New York Review Books has reissued two Hughes novels, In a Lonely Place (1947) and this one. Both are good, but this one is better. It’s a “wrong man” novel with a plot element that a reader in 1963 probably would not have anticipated. In 2022 you might. (I did.)

I suspect that Hughes was hoping that this novel, like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse. would be adapated for the screen, and I suspect that she had an actor in mind for Dr. Hugh Densmore, her main character. But I can say more only in the privacy of a phone booth.