[2] Hughes's first published book, Dark Certainty (1931), a volume of poetry, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition.
She also wrote a history of the University of New Mexico and a critical study of writer Erle Stanley Gardner.
[3] Her writing style and suspenseful plots exemplify the hardboiled genre of crime and detective novels, and her literary career associates her with other female crime writers of the 1940s and 1950s, such as Margaret Millar, Vera Caspary, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, and Olive Higgins Prouty.
In his afterword to a reissue of her last novel, The Expendable Man (1963), Walter Mosley wrote that her fiction "captures an unease under the skin of everyday life in a way that is all her own.
From 1940 to 1979 she reviewed mysteries for The Albuquerque Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Herald-Tribune and other newspapers.