tartan noir
n.— «Scottish detective fiction, or Tartan Noir as it’s called, with its brooding sensibility, brutal humor and fixation on the nature of guilt and punishment, has more in common with the Russian novel than it does with traditional detective writing.» —“Denise Mina and the rise of Scottish detective fiction” by Dinitia Smith New York Times July 23, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has been busy writing sequels to famous novels inspired by changing the tense of verbs in their titles. For example, what might be his new iteration of a classic Gabriel García Márquez tale about two romantic youths who became...
‘Tartan noir’ is a famous literary genere, made famous by writers like Irvine Welsh, Ian Rankin.
The catchword itself I’ve seen in a book review in the men’s magazine GQ.