This paper examines how noir fiction provides a distinctive lens for analysing neoliberalism by foregrounding the affective dimensions of life under late capitalism. While crime fiction has long interrogated the tensions between legality, justice, and social order, noir’s sustained commitment to negativity—its moods of dread, paralysis, cynicism, and obstructed agency—renders it uniquely attuned to the lived contradictions of neoliberal restructuring. The paper first surveys key scholarly interventions that interpret crime fiction as a critique of global capitalism, drawing on Andrew Pepper’s account of crime fiction as a genre capable of exposing the hidden violence of capital; Misha Kokotovic’s formulation of “neoliberal noir” in post war Central America, where cynical aesthetics dismantle the fantasy of the sovereign neoliberal individual; and Matthew Christensen’s analysis of crime genres as contemporary sites for exploring crises of sovereignty and social obligation under neoliberal governance. Together, these readings demonstrate how crime fiction maps shifting formations of power, precocity and dispossession. The second part turns to affect theory to extend this critique by considering how neoliberalism is sensed, inhabited, and emotionally managed. Through Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, the paper situates neoliberalism as an affective regime that attaches subjects to fantasies of the “good life” even as material conditions render those fantasies unattainable. Additional insights from Sianne Ngai highlight how negative affects like paranoia, stuckness, anxiety, and other “ugly feelings”, reveal the obstructed agency and suspended action characteristic of neoliberal subjectivity. Bringing these strands together, the final section argues that noir fiction operates as a privileged site of affective critique. Noir’s atmospheric negativity does not merely accompany its plots; it becomes a mode of knowledge that makes visible the emotional and ideological pressures structuring contemporary life. The paper contends that noir’s refusal of optimism, closure, or sovereign agency exposes the affective costs of neoliberal rationality and offers a counter-sensorium through which readers can apprehend the contradictions of late capitalism. By joining ideological and affective analysis, the paper proposes a framework for understanding noir as a form that renders neoliberalism not only narratively legible but viscerally felt.