Historical Noir
by Barry Forshaw, No Exit, 220pp, £9.99
As we rush headlong into an uncertain future that seems at once both disorientating and lacking a moral centre, writers are increasingly looking back and setting their novels in an earlier time; a place where mobile phones don’t buzz and the truth is still something worth fighting for.
Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose came out in 1980 and catapulted historical crime into a new renaissance. I still remember that eerie feeling of transportation as I turned the pages and was hurled back into the day-to-day life of a medieval monastery. Eco cleverly used a crime fiction structure to frame debates about God and nature while utilising Thomistic logic as an investigative tool.
