Something terrible has happened to Daniel Quinn, but we don’t know what it is. All we know is that he has rented a flat at the top of a high- rise block in Birmingham where he watches the same video over and over again, a British film noir called Out of the Dark. What is he looking for in this corny old black and white B-flick? As the edges of the film and real life begin to blur, we wonder if Daniel is being dragged down into a similar whirlpool of deceit, corruption and murder.
"A fresh, individual energy in its versatile mix of the playful and the serious, freely shuffling the actual with the imagined, that makes it pleasurable, compulsive reading." Shiny New Books
"Gaffney describes both the film and Quinn's life with incredible precision, blurring the line between reading and watching... Just like a film noir, Gaffney deftly handles past and present, dropping both clues and red herrings along the way, all the while pulling us towards the answer that Quinn is searching for..."
The Crack
David Gaffney lives in Manchester. He is the author of the novels Never Never (2008) and All The Places I've Ever Lived (2017) and the flash fiction and short story collections Sawn-Off Tales (2006), Aromabingo (2007), The Half-Life of Songs (2010) and More Sawn-Off Tales (2013). He has written articles for the Guardian, Sunday Times, Financial Times and Prospect magazine, and was a judge for the Bridport Prize in 2015. His story ‘The Staring Man’ was featured in Best British Short Stories (2016). He has published two graphic novels with Dan Berry: The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head (2018) and Rivers (2021).
