“All that filled his mind in that moment was the simple idea that this was life and nothing else… life itself always went on, unending and unfair in equal measure, like all things that have been ordained and yet are impossible to see in advance.” Such thoughts – the fatalistic reflections of a hotel caretaker dancing in the surf at a beach café after stealing a cache of money that a resident had acquired by fraud – make unlikely closing lines in a novel that centres on crime.
The genre is one of many relics of monotheism that shape contemporary Western culture. With few exceptions, crime fiction presents a world in which human events form a coherent narrative held together by notions of right and wrong. If the classic detective story is a puzzle soluble by reason, hard-bitten noir describes those who investigate crime, and sometimes criminals themselves, as rebels against injustice. The protagonists are in search of redemption, and if they fail in their struggles they are still inspired by a moral vision.
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