Chris Petit’s The Psalm Killer – a psychopath in sectarian Ireland

Petit’s fictional account of the Troubles was not only a perfectly judged slice of nerve-shredding noir, says Alan Moore, it was also a political investigation into a dark period of recent history

In film and writing, noir – not a colour but a vital absence of the same – is nonetheless a necessary hue. The stark radiance of a composition becomes evident only when it lacks distractions of the spectrum and its gaudy splashes of attached sensation, just as a morally abysmal ground makes any human light displayed against it the more brilliant in the narrative.

Chris Petit, as an author, is of a variety that could not have existed prior to the later 20th century and is still exotic – namely someone whose approach to crafting literature commences from a starting point of cinema, where the priorities and processes are very different. Time jumps its sequential tracks and is dismantled, fracturing in the stuck-needle repetition of the retake, shuffled into new chronologies by the demands of shooting schedules, with the semblance of a continuity or plot emerging only in the edit, this being as true of daily news as of a Jason Statham vehicle. Authorial sleights of hand allowed by moving pictures – all that visual background to hide details in; the fleeting blink-and-miss-it nature of the medium itself – cannot be replicated in prose fiction, where there is no background beyond the flat surface of the words, and where those words stay frozen on their paper screen allowing for examination. Text requires its own illusionist’s devices.

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