Beyond the solitary hero (or antihero)
It is time I wrote something about the ideology behind my novels: Lamb to the Slaughter, A Drop of Courage, and the soon-to-be-published A Residue of Murder.
They are “noir” but a different shade of noir.
Noir is a world of moral ambiguity, where the line between crime and justice is blurred. The protagonists are isolated figures, operating at the margins, distrustful of institutions and alienated from the certainties of bourgeois society. They act against overwhelming odds.
It’s a great tradition, but one that reinforces Hollywood’s escapist illusions.
In what I think of as network noir, the solitary figure gives way to something more diffuse. Agency is shared, unevenly, across small groups and loose alliances. Decisions are made collectively, often under pressure, and responsibility is not always easy to assign. The question is not what one person is prepared to do acting alone, but what a group can justify to itself.
This changes the emotional register. The characters are not detached or indifferent. They are bound to one another, for better or worse, which creates both solidarity and discord. Loyalty to a cause becomes a vulnerability.
The central protagonist in my novels is Alex Martin. But he has no super powers. Rather, over the course of the trilogy he becomes better at recognising and orchestrating the special talents and powers of people in his network.
If the classic noir protagonist stands apart from society, the figures in network noir are more entangled within it, navigating messy compromises and mutual suspicion. The result is not clarity but a different kind of tension: even justified actions carry unintended consequences.
My first novel, Lamb to the Slaughter, operates within this space. Set in Brighton and London in the late 1980s, it follows a group of comrades as they move from activism to something more ambiguous and more dangerous. In the second novel, A Drop of Courage, Alex must try to engage the network from his isolation in Estonia.
In A Residue of Murder the network loses a comrade but gains new associates who enable it to overcome seemingly impossible odds.
I think this is closer to how the world works in reality. Organic networks that evolve over time.
These networks matter more than the individuals.
