We've named this edition of the festival after the theme of the 'double': the double identity of great mysteries in every form they take. So we've asked our best-known noir author and the festival's old friend, Carlo Lucarelli, to summon to the NoirFest a number of writers working in the genre vein to discuss the two sides of the crime novel: the investigation itself and the noirish torments of the victims and their killers. And not so much to pit one aspect of the genre against the other, or the writers leaning one way or the other; that would be an exercise in futility, given that (as Lucarelli himself points out in the talk to follow) they are two sides of the same coin, like two different styles for the same musical genre. Instead, we hope that the discussion will help determine which of the two souls of thrillers prevails among successful writers in the genre today, if either prevails at all. It may well be that our writers's contemporary take on crime is perfectly balanced, providing readers with, in equal measure, the rationality of an investigation and the irrational descent into hell represented by a psycho-social examination of evil.

Lucarelli will be the judge.