From its inception, the noir novel has provided a suitably brutal critique of capitalism and modern statecraft. The first of its kind, Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929), depicted a midwest town where industrialists used gangsters to deal with organised labour, only to lose control of the violent forces they had unleashed. A stark tale based on the author’s own experience as a Pinkerton strikebreaker, it spawned a whole genre in which detectives manage crime rather than solve it.
Leading examples of such fractured narratives that reimagine a setting and its legacy through a glass darkly include James Ellroy’s LA Quartet and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Jamaica. In Lavie Tidhar’s Maror, the latest troubled topography to get the noir treatment is the state of Israel, in a sprawling epic set across four decades, and an audacious account of the underbelly of nation-building. Known for SF novels that provocatively push at the boundaries of genre, Israeli-born Tidhar now boldly employs noir with spectacular results.
