Tangiers, Casablanca – in the pages of Hamdouchi’s detective noir fiction these iconic Moroccan cities are no longer tourist destinations or the backdrop of Hollywood movies. Instead, they have become settings in which the novelist and his Moroccan audience can safely explore some of the nation’s most troubling contemporary social issues: police corruption, poverty, harragas, religious radicalization and neo-liberal globalization. While social critique is not new in Moroccan literature, the move to the noir genre, a phenomenon that Alghureiby (2015) argues is growing generally in Arabic literature since the Arab Spring, suggests a new critical tone and experimental narrative style(s). It is less poetic or literary and more cynical and realistic, which more accurately reflects a post-Arab Spring ambiance and attitude of protest and disgust with the status quo. While Mohamed Choukri’s For Bread Alone (originally published in Arabic in 1973) introduced readers to the dark underbelly of Tangiers through poverty and prostitution, Hamdouchi’s novel White Fly goes further by exploring these topics (and contemporary issues such as harragas and tensions with Spain over fishing and the Spanish autonomous cities of Sebta and Melilla) through the character of the police detective Laafrit (whose nickname translates as “Crafty”). Casablanca, the setting of Bled Dry, as well as several other films and novels in the noir genre, introduces a reader to police detective Hamash, an unsympathetic and deeply corrupt character. Smolin’s Moroccan Noir (2013) traces the rise of police-infused writing and visual production (from tabloids through television serials to novels) exploring ways in which a state-led more sympathetic version of the police is constructed in the post Years of Lead era, a form of “soft power” described by Nye, in which technology, information and culture (rather than military force) is used to create “a generally positive disposition.” The 1990s also saw a “soft power” approach being used by civil society (such as women’s organizations and other liberal intelligentsia) through their use of film and literature combined with more direct political action to promote reforms to the Moudawana. Yet this emerging noir literature of the 21st century, punctuated by Arab uprisings of 2011, as will be demonstrated, is doing different work, exposing the country’s political malaise and challenging ideological assumptions and hierarchies (class, language) through the protection of the “welder’s mask” of noir literature, allowing us “to draw close to the flame of our culture's evils without [for now] actually getting burned” (Nickerson).