Sophie Gee

So there's a really interesting literary arc in place there, I think.

And just to kind of tie a bow around that point, we mentioned very early on, courtesy of my friend Mungo, that Allingham is kind of channeling and repurposing, reusing, well, lots of aspects of literary noir, but one of them is Graham Greene as this new voice in English writing in the 30s that's really disrupting the sort of bright young things novel, the kind of

cheery, decadent, you know, lighthearted interwar novel.

Graham Greene really kind of comes in and interrupts that genre and writes books like Brighton Rock, which are these very dark, brooding, Brighton Rock's an underworld thriller.

But what I wanted to say is that

the kind of contest that Graham Greene is bringing up in his writing is this contest between good and evil.

And for Greene, it's all kind of diverted through his own conversion to Roman Catholicism.

His kind of turning toward the church is this kind of

icon or stable source of a sense of what good is in a world that's been completely disordered by, you know, no longer being able to tell the difference between good and evil.

And so Graham Greene's novels are always on some level sort of allegories for this contest between the good of Catholicism and the kind of the evil of the world outside it.

And there's this really crucial scene, isn't there, in The Tiger in the Smoke, where Jack Havoc

comes up directly against canon avril and they have this kind of standoff this face off and it's interesting isn't it that as a cleric the canon is referred to as a canon as opposed to a reverend so it's already sort of implying his kind of connection to a very ancient version of the church in england it's it's very high anglicanism yeah very high almost catholic

Yeah, exactly.

And in this scene, without wanting to spoil it, the canon's goodness, his religious, not just his religious, but his kind of moral and ethical clarity and sense of deep goodness actually sort of interrupts Jack Havoc's psychopathy for the first and only time in his life.

He's unable to be malignant.

I knew you had something fantastic in your back pocket.

And you're sort of making the point, I think, which is absolutely brilliant.

You're on fire today, Jonty.

You're making the point that Jack Havoc's Science of Luck is a retake on existentialist philosophy.

So brilliant.