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| Iannis Alliferis |
Noir is not only a matter of crime. It is a way of looking at pressure, desire, weakness, temptation, and the slow collapse of certainty. In the work of Iannis Aliferis, that darkness moves between page and screen, between pulp rhythm and cinematic shadow.
His recent novel A Killer Case: A Samantha Rutledge Adventure steps directly into the world of pulp noir, private eyes, compromised motives, and dangerous encounters. But behind the genre machinery there is something deeper: moral ambiguity, visual storytelling, and a fascination with the night as a place of freedom, danger, silence, intimacy, and revelation.
For Dark Jazz Radio, Iannis Aliferis talks about noir, writing across different forms, the pull of pulp atmosphere, and why some characters seem doomed from the moment they step into the light.
Iannis Aliferis Interview
For readers discovering your work for the first time, who is Iannis Aliferis as a writer?
Just someone who tries to honestly express himself and who gets endless enjoyment out of making stuff up. I love most genres, but perhaps feel most at home with dark thrillers and with characters of a rather moral ambiguity.
You move between fiction, screenwriting, and film. What changes for you when a story belongs to the page rather than the screen?
Great question. With a novel, the world opens up. There’s a lot more introspection. A screenplay is bound by its structure and is meant to be concise in execution. It also serves as a blueprint; it’s part of a collaborative collective. It is a map you create and pass on to other creatives to build upon. In comparison, writing a novel is a solo enterprise. Both writing avenues have their own beauty, but it must be said that prose feels more unfettered.
Your recent novel A Killer Case enters the world of pulp noir very directly. What pulled you toward that form and that atmosphere?
It’s just so distinctive, it oozes with style, and has always stood out to me. I first came upon noir through cinema, with films starring the legendary Humphrey Bogart, and titles such as The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and In a Lonely Place. In more recent times, I have taken a keen liking to books published under the Hard Case Crime banner, with authors such as Max Allan Collins, Donald E. Westlake, and Christa Faust.
What do you find in noir that other kinds of storytelling cannot give you?
Noir lives in the grey; it thrives in the shadows.
There you will find doomed protagonists waiting for you. They will be full of style and human error, and you won’t be able to help but associate yourself with them and want them to win, then watch helplessly, knowing damn well, as they do, that they are marching headlong into their own destruction.
You will find the love interest, the mistress of seduction, and one single look will get you hooked, and you will swear to all the gods and all the devils in existence that you will do anything just to spend a single night with them in a shady motel.
You’ll find neon lighting, silhouettes by the street lamp, murkiness and gloom, venetian blinds, trench coats, and a smoking Colt Detective Special.
Lastly, you’ll find ambiguity, compromised characters, murky motives, corrupt officials, lust masquerading as love, and “right” choices that lead to the wrong outcomes.
When you begin a new work, do you start with character, conflict, image, or mood?
Usually, it is with a character, and the plot grows from there. However, with A Killer Case: A Samantha Rutledge Adventure, it was with a setup, a question: what if a glum private eye takes on another seemingly open and shut case of infidelity, but it turns out that the cheating spouse is, in fact, a professional killer? The moment the question was asked, it wouldn’t leave me alone, and so I set off to answer it.
Your work carries both cinematic motion and literary shadow. How important is visual thinking in the way you write?
Thinking visually is essential to the way I approach a story. Screenwriting became my main focus of writing for many years. This was largely due to my love for cinema and for comic books. It was an ideal fit for me. This approach is still a part of me when I write novels.
What does the night mean to you as an artist? Is it freedom, danger, silence, intimacy, or revelation?
The night is truly special, and it means all of the above:
Freedom: Crossing endless dark highways by car. Meeting quirky, offbeat characters. A new location at dusk. A sense of living outside the chained rules of society.
Danger: A serial killer in a crowd. A gang of thugs in an abandoned alleyway. A femme fatale in a red dress at the diner.
Silence: A quiet park in the middle of the asphalt jungle. A watering hole of dedicated, melancholic drinkers. Smoking on the roof of a building while overlooking the city below.
Intimacy: A chance encounter with the love of your life at the 24 hour supermarket. Under the sheets but awake until dawn.
Revelation: A journey through the unconscious. A conversation with the shadow self.
Do you see noir mainly as a genre of crime, or more deeply as a form about pressure, fracture, and the things people hide from themselves?
Noir presents us a world of crime, but that is simply the invitation. Once inside, one finds that the rules of the game are simple: moral pressure and psychological fracture reign supreme, but they are on a slow burning pot. Tension builds, accompanied by a healthy dose of self deception. The mask only drops when the inevitable finale arrives, and you realize that the odds were never on your side.
All that is then left is one final drag from the death stick. How do you protect intensity in your work without falling into repetition, especially when moving across different forms?
- You have to stay honest with yourself. No matter what. Do I have something I really want to tell? You can’t force something; you have to let it grow organically. The best writing happens when there’s something that won’t let me be. It keeps pestering me to express it. That is when I know I have to heed the call and get it all out on paper.
When someone finishes one of your stories or films, what do you hope remains with them after the final page or final scene?
- Truthfully, a moment of emotional resonance. That is the ideal, that is the hope: That what was created made someone feel something. If the story creates a poignant effect on the reader/viewer, even a small one, I’ll be the happiest son of a bitch in the world.
What emerges from Aliferis’ answers is a clear sense of noir as more than style, more than crime, more than smoke and shadow. For him, noir is a pressure chamber. It is where characters reveal themselves by failing, desiring, lying, surviving, and sometimes walking knowingly toward their own ruin.
That is also why A Killer Case feels so naturally connected to the world of pulp noir: a seemingly simple case, a private eye, a dangerous twist, and beneath it all the older noir question that never really dies. What happens when the truth arrives too late?
In that sense, the interview does not only introduce a writer. It opens a door into the kind of darkness Dark Jazz Radio returns to again and again: the darkness of mood, crime, night, desire, and the human mind when it starts speaking too honestly.
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You can find A Killer Case: A Samantha Rutledge Adventure here: https://amzn.to/4cM3BNU
Read also:
- Noir and Desire: The Hunger That Cannot End
- The Detective Who Arrives Too Late: Delay as Noir Structure
- The Sound of Night: A Beginner’s Guide to Dark Jazz
Works and Names Mentioned
- A Killer Case: A Samantha Rutledge Adventure by Iannis Aliferis
- The Maltese Falcon
- The Big Sleep
- In a Lonely Place
- Humphrey Bogart
- Hard Case Crime
- Max Allan Collins
- Donald E. Westlake
- Christa Faust
Alongside his fiction and screenwriting, Aliferis also runs Pulpy Hideout, a YouTube channel dedicated to film, art, noir atmosphere, pulp storytelling, and the strange pleasures of genre cinema. It is another side of the same creative instinct: a place where cinema, shadow, taste, and obsession meet.
He also maintains a screenwriter page, where readers can explore his work for film and script based storytelling, connecting the literary side of his noir imagination with the visual language of cinema.
You can visit Pulpy Hideout here: Pulpy Hideout on YouTube.
You can visit his screenwriter page here: Iannis Aliferis Screenwriter
Stay with Dark Jazz Radio for more conversations with writers, filmmakers, musicians, and night minded creators working in the shadows of noir, weird fiction, and cinematic darkness.