David Mamet’s second novel takes one of the most infamous incidents of US anti-Semitism and weaves it into a short but densely packed narrative told exclusively from inside Leo Frank’s own head. But don’t mistake this for rage against injustice by man facing his own mortality. Originally condemned to die at his trial, Frank saw his sentence commuted to life, only to fall victim to the jungle-justice of prison life by having his throat slashed by a fellow inmate. It was while he was recovering from that horror that those ordinary, decent citizens came for him in the night.

No, Mamet’s argument is that Frank was less the victim of a corrupt judicial system than of cowardice in the face of his own cultural identity. His Jewishness finds expression in ritual at home, but this is a man who finds no great prick to his conscience by working on the Sabbath. Indeed, had he not, then the Saturday of the murder he would not even have been in the factory. Mamet infers that the real perpetrator was a black sweeper who faked a message by his victim to throw suspicion, then convinced the court of his own illiteracy.

The abuse meted out to the Jews, even rich, successful ones, says Mamet, outweighed even hatred towards blacks; something of which Frank himself is not innocent. Thus Frank’s circumcision and his wife’s excessive waistline are held up as evidence of his outsiderness by a public baying for blood. In prison, Frank is tutored in Hebrew by a Rabbi, finding in despair his own truth, so long denied. By attempting assimilation into a white Christian culture, he decides, he has betrayed his own national identity, and thus fallen almost willing victim to its laws. ‘Who was the outsider? The Kike. The ‘Nigger to the nth degree’.’

Mamet, best known as one of the world’s finest dramatists, has spoken of The Novel as an opportunity to immerse himself in thought processes, and few novels immerse their readers quite so deeply as The Old Religion. It’s an unsparing book, particularly as we realise Frank’s own acceptance of his eventual fate.

This is not written in the sharp, sparse dialogue for which Mamet is rightly lauded, and yet it does serve as a curious negative to his third, and best, feature, Homicide. In that film, Joe Mantegna’s police detective discovers and embraces his own ethnicity, only to find his assumptions and actions morally bankrupted by extremism. The film’s final revelation is one of the blackest in all of cinema. In The Old Religion, the protagonist’s journey is similar, but is at least spiritually, if not physically, fulfilling. As in indictment of institutionalised racism - Frank, the unrepentant Jew, is ultimately more Christian and forgiving than those who kill him in Christ’s name - it makes for an equally rigorous and disquieting exercise.