Queer noir lands in Dublin
Djamel White's debut *All Them Dogs* treats male violence and desire as the same impulse, photographed at different exposures.
The Guardian reviews All Them Dogs, a debut neo-noir set in Dublin's housing estates and old grudges. Two violent men circle each other; the violence and the attraction turn out to be the same circuit, wired differently.
The review's phrase — "homoerotic dance of desire and betrayal" — sounds overheated until you remember Irish literature has been writing around this dynamic for a century. Joyce, McCabe, Doyle: men who can name everything except what they feel about each other. White stops writing around it.
Why it matters: Crime fiction usually treats male intimacy as buddy-cop or rivalry. White makes the genre carry weight literary fiction tends to handle gingerly, and lets Dublin's geography do the rest.
Read next: Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You. Different country, different register, same proposition — that desire and violence between men aren't opposites but variations on a theme one of them refuses to say out loud.
