The Scottish poet Robin Robertson’s verse novel The Long Take (Picador) was shortlisted for the 218 Man Booker Prize, the first verse novel to be considered for the prize. The protagonist of The Long Take is Walker, a Canadian veteran of World War II, who hails from Cape Breton, NS. Walker suffers from PTSD, having witnessed the so-called Normandy Massacres of June 1944, in which captured Canadian soldiers were summarily executed by members of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. Following his discharge, Walker leaves Nova Scotia (his father remarking: “The war was one thing, but this is another. You’re the first of us to leave in one hundred and seventy years”). He drifts aimlessly and anonymously in the crowded American metropolises, travelling from New York City to Los Angeles, where he is eventually hired as a stringer by an L.A. newspaper, the Press. Throughout his wandering, Walker stays in a variety of cheap hotels and rooming houses; he drinks in beat-up bars; he talks to other drifters, many of them former veterans like himself. “From his bed and the biscuity sheets/he hears an upstairs neighbor coughing,/smells cockroaches and poison,/sees where a rat’s made scrimshaw of the baseboard,/trying to get out.” It is, in short, the perfect setup for a classic “film noir”—and in fact many of these are name-checked by Walker as he wanders the nighttime streets of old L.A., while sections of the city slowly succumb to urban redevelopment: “Breaks in the street where buildings had been,/being cleared for parking lots.” The notes at the end of Robertson’s novel would serve as an excellent introduction to west coast film noir: notes on Ride the Pink Horse (1947) and Out of the Past (1947), all the way to Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and The Big Combo (1955). The Long Take is a moody, and mournful, elegy for the genre.