Out of the Dark

David Gaffney's superb ode to film noir.

There is a passage in David Gaffney’s 2022 novel that brings to mind Norma Desmond, the faded movie star in Billy Wilder’s Hollywood noir Sunset Boulevard. Daniel Quinn, a twenty-six year old obsessed with Out of the Dark, a forgotten 1960s British B-picture, observes its washed-up star Mathilde Pelletier from a door in her West Midlands flat:

I went to …