Moore has created a Chandlerian shoal of red herrings, drawing viewers into a dark and dense mystery set in the very centre of England
Northampton, the magical potency of fiction, eternalism … Alan Moore, recovering graphic novelist and screenwriter of The Show, gives his longtime preoccupations a vaudevillian twirl in this cinematic outing that – unusually – is not based on one of his comics. He gives himself a twirl too, cameoing in this Northampton noir as a ghastly light-entertainment throwback with hair and beard styled into a crescent
moon.
The Souvenir’s Tom Burke plays Fletcher Dennis, a private eye dispatched to the dead centre of middle
England by East End hardnut Bleaker (Christopher Fairbank) to locate the lover who fatally battered his daughter and recover a Rosicrucian pendant stolen from her. But digging around Northampton, the detective – via a plummy dame (Siobhan Hewlett) admitted to the hospital on the same night as the now-deceased lothario – uncovers a string of weird coincidences. Notably, why all leads point towards a burned-down nightspot in which Metterton and Matchbright, a pair of seedy Pete’n’Dud-style comedians, perished in 1973.