Stay (novel)

Novel by Nicola Griffith, continuing the story of her private detective character, Aud Torvingen, from The Blue Place (1999).

On her work being "noir", Griffith wrote:

Joy is one of the reasons I don't see Stay as a noir novel. Noir, the way I understand it, is all about being trapped by circumstance. It is about ordinary people leading small lives who make one mistake and, phht, that's it, it's all over, because when they try to correct their mistake they just end up digging themselves a deeper hole. At every moment of the novel they and the reader know that their eventual downfall is inevitable. They struggle against this inevitable end not out of a need to hold onto something good in their lives, but because they are so mired in their own circumstance they don't know what else to do. On those occasions where they appear to avoid punishment for their deeds (Highsmith's Ripley, Hammett's Spade), they and we know that it doesn't matter: their own essential nature dooms them to repeat their mistakes. Noir is the horror fiction of the crime genre.