Criminal Affects: Hard-Boiled Discourse and the New Cultures of Fear in Patrick Neate's City of Tiny Lights

This chapter reads Patrick Neate's novel City of Tiny Lights (2005) as a text that uses the noir discourse to map the multi-ethnic metropolis after 9/11. Noir is a crucial discourse of the (Western) city, concerned with the containability of crime, enabling a ♭normal' urban life. City of Tiny Lights is a noir thriller morphing into what seems like a multicultural noir or even a post-9/11 noir. Introducing Black British war veteran (ex-Mujahedin and ex-cia agent) Tommy Akhtar as private detective, Neate's novel stages the disintegration of the noir plot through a twofold redrawing of the city's cartography: Akhtar's past and his "soldier identity" transform the city into a war zone; while simultaneously the international geopolitical conditions ? involving arms deals and terrorism ? that generate the plot question the relevance of noir investigative methods and the competence of the private eye, while the morphology of the city is altered beyond the authority of Akhtar and of the noir genre.