Guest Entry by James Key (Author of In The Dark)

“I like film noir, because it is the only film genre that really captures the dark and mysterious properly for me. I’ve written a short story, In the Dark, that is basically a film noir in a book. What I wanted to write was a typical film noir story, with an unexpected twist, and that’s how In the Dark came to life.

I suppose it is a story that still has a lot of modern in it, which cannot be avoided these days… I don’t know enough about the history that formed the basis for the film noir, so I didn’t feel comfortable going straight for the time, I prefered to stay in our current era… I know I wanted to be a private detective as a child, so I guess that I do relate to detective Palmer a lot, but he is not actually based on me or on any real person I know or am in any way familiar with. Someone asked me once, after reading the story, if I based Palmer on the Jimmy Palmer character in the NCIS series, but that is ridiculous, I actually had to look the series up to figure out who that was, as I don’t watch it.

I chose the name because it just sounded right, and because it fitted to my idea of a man maybe in his thirties wearing that typical hat and suit, even if that’s unlikely, given the fact that I set my story in modern times. But as an author, I’m allowed a little bit of dreaming, right?”