Victorious corruption
Armand’s novel is a reprise for a coven of readers and cineastes, a way of reminding us of the permanent aura and atmosphere that noir styles into the imagination, that prolonged anti-meditation of souls going to hell in a hand cart. The book has that kind of plaintive wakefulness, where along with all the other noirs we know and love we recede into the same distance. And this is a book to be read measuring the distance, a distance that is for each individual the period between now and the first time you watched or read your first noir and knew there and then that it defined a sensibility that would continue to process and create you forever as a victorious corruption.
Richard Marshall reviews Louis Armand’s Breakfast At Midnight