conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Specializing, Short, Stories with the genre: Literature & Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'In a Lonely Place'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first three paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In a Lonely Place
  Brub nodded heavily. There wasn't an atom of suspicion left in him. If there ever had been. "Yes. Another one."
  Dix let the horror mount in his face. "Bets... the little... the girl who looked... like Brucie..." He didn't have to control his voice.
  Anger, the hard iron of anger, clanged in Brub. "I'd kill him with my bare hands if I could lay them on him."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Dix finished his poor breakfast and left. There was more blue in the sky now. The sun was bringing warmth into the day. It was nothing to him. It was an empty day, a day to be passed, before another night would come. Another empty night, and yet another empty day to follow. He ought to leave town at once, not wait for his clothes to be returned by the cleaner, not wait for a woman who would not come again.
  He swung the car over to Santa Monica Boulevard, drove into Santa Monica. He intended stopping at the Santa Fe office, to find out about railroad tickets east. He'd have to hold out enough money for return fare. But there was no place to park and in irritation he drove away, cutting across to Wilshire. He had no intention of turning west, yet he did. And he followed the avenue to the Incline, down the Incline to the beach road. It didn't look any different. There were no police lines. There were perhaps more cars than usual parked along the street. Yet perhaps not. With the day warming, the beach regulars would be out in force. Dix didn't slow the car. He drove on down the road, turned off into the canyon and back to town.
  He didn't realize that he was being followed until he was held by the light at the San Vicente eucalyptus grove. Until he remembered that the shabby sedan that drew up beside him had been behind him when he turned to the beach. Digging back, he knew it had been behind him when he left the drugstore; uncertainly, he remembered seeing it before then. His hands were cold against the wheel. It couldn't be.
  And he was right, it couldn't be. The two men in the sedan were ordinary, and the car didn't wait for Dix to turn, it headed out ahead of him on the green. It was nerves, induced by the early morning visit of Springer and Yates, by the irritation of the gardeners and the lineman and forgetting where he'd left the car. You couldn't drive many blocks without running into a shabby black sedan with two men in it, Wilshire was full of like cars right now.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It was Brub who began talking to him as if he were a human being. "It's no use, Dix. We have Mildred Atkinson's fingerprints in your car. There's only one way they could get there."
  Brub was lying, trying to trap him. They hadn't had time to take all the fingerprints out of that car while they talked with him today. They had time to take them while the car stood in the garage or at the curb, while a gardener guarded each door of the apartment by day, while men in the shadows watched the doors at night.
  For one moment the old Brub broke through the deadly, grim-visaged cop. The old Brub cried out in agony, "For God's sake, why did you do it, Dix?"
  He sat there very quietly, trying not to hear, not to speak, not to feel. But the tears rose in his throat, matted his eyes, he could not withhold them longer.
  This is certainly Dix's view. "They were all alike, cheats, liars, whores," he reflects. "Even the pious ones were only waiting for a chance to cheat and lie and whore." Hughes's trick, however, is to situate the narrative impulses that drive noir in the mind of a man whom she is painting, inch by inch, as a violent and mentally ill criminal. With each passing chapter, we come to doubt or utterly reject Dix's characterizations of both others and himself. For instance, the moment Dix sees the life his wartime buddy Brub, now a cop, has made for himself—home, hearth, and domesticity embodied in his new wife, Sylvia—he feels a rage he cannot understand or control. Brub, to Dix, has been "made different by being chained to a woman." Pussy-whipped. The warm, homosocial world of the war is gone forever and in its place is only isolation and paranoia. In the expressionistic world of film noir, such paranoia is justified and universal. For Hughes, however, it is specific, personal, unglamorous, ugly, even ridiculous. By the novel's final stretch, an increasingly out-of-control Dix determines that the cleaning lady and her "hideous siren" of a vacuum cleaner are out to get him.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: By the novel's final stretch, an increasingly out-of-control Dix determines that the cleaning lady and her "hideous siren" of a vacuum cleaner are out to get him. "It's no use, Dix. We have Mildred Atkinson's fingerprints in your car. There's only one way they could get there."
  Brub was lying, trying to trap him. They hadn't had time to take all the fingerprints out of that car while they talked with him today. They had time to take them while the car stood in the garage or at the curb, while a gardener guarded each door of the apartment by day, while men in the shadows watched the doors at night.
  For one moment the old Brub broke through the deadly, grim-visaged cop. The old Brub cried out in agony, "For God's sake, why did you do it, Dix?"
  He sat there very quietly, trying not to hear, not to speak, not to feel. But the tears rose in his throat, matted his eyes, he could not withhold them longer.
  This is certainly Dix's view. "They were all alike, cheats, liars, whores," he reflects. "Even the pious ones were only waiting for a chance to cheat and lie and whore." Hughes's trick, however, is to situate the narrative impulses that drive noir in the mind of a man whom she is painting, inch by inch, as a violent and mentally ill criminal. With each passing chapter, we come to doubt or utterly reject Dix's characterizations of both others and himself. For instance, the moment Dix sees the life his wartime buddy Brub, now a cop, has made for himself—home, hearth, and domesticity embodied in his new wife, Sylvia—he feels a rage he cannot understand or control. Brub, to Dix, has been "made different by being chained to a woman." Pussy-whipped. The warm, homosocial world of the war is gone forever and in its place is only isolation and paranoia. In the expressionistic world of film noir, such paranoia is justified and universal. For Hughes, however, it is specific, personal, unglamorous, ugly, even ridiculous.It was Brub who began talking to him as if he were a human being.