Against the Man

An article I wrote about Noir and its love of sticking it to the Man is on Milo's Rambles:

When I began writing The First Stone in 2008, I had been watching America lose its mind from the safety of this side of the Atlantic for several years. The panic caused by terrorism and an ascendant religious right was a potent and frightening cocktail. I wanted to talk about that mixture of faith and authoritarianism, and I decided on the hard-boiled detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Noir might seem an odd choice at first. It's best known for witty one-liners, untrustworthy dames, and marble-mouthed gangsters. Next to the hoods and molls is another tradition just as important, one that's been around since Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest: corruption. This is corruption not only of the personal kind, affairs and drug habits that are the bread and butter of any private detective, but the official corruption of the mobbed-up mayor and the dirty cop.

There's more goodness where that came from, so head on over and give Miles a hit (as in unique impression, not smack.)