Noir and Urban Fantasy
Awhile back, I joined a fiction community at livejournal.com called Prose Challenge. The community's "blurb" is
This is a community for those of you that enjoy creative writing. Every one - two weeks a new challenge will be posted. As an example, we might give you a title, an opening sentence, a picture, or something completely different. It is then up to you to write a story of up to 5000 words that links to the prompt we gave you. You do not have to enter every single challenge, it's up to you which ones you feel like doing.
and while I can't come up with something for every challenge, I usually try. It's a good community, and the prompts help keep me inspired to write, and I enjoy the practice of having to actually finish pieces every week; endings are much harder to practice than beginnings, after all.
I bring this up because this week's (week 33!) challenge is to write a film noir piece that takes place in an unusual location. While I often describe myself as an urban fantasy reader primarily, the truth is that my absolute favorite niche of the sci-fi/fantasy genre is what I like to call "noir fantasy." The Dresden Files (beginning with STORM FRONT) by Jim Butcher are a good example of this, as are Glen Cook's Garrett, P.I. books (beginning with SWEET SILVER BLUES), the Cal Leandros (NIGHTLIFE) books by Rob Thurman, The Vampire Files (BLOODLIST) by P.N. Elrod, and the Nightside (WELCOME TO THE NIGHTSIDE) books by Simon R. Green.
I admit I'm a little young for true film noir, but even though I've never seen THE MALTESE FALCON or even had much luck sitting through BLADE RUNNER, I love the concept of the hardboiled, down-on-his-luck private detective, I love the femme fatales, and I love the conventions of the genre that have become established. I love how it has its own language, its own tropes. Even if film noir is difficult to define precisely, the mood of fantasy noir is a wonderful blend of dark idealism and gritty hopefulness that I really love. One of my favorite episodes of Charmed was CHARMED NOIR (episode 7.08), where Paige and Kyle end up sucked into a 1930s film noir written by former Magic School students.
I tend to think of such noir fantasy as a subset of the urban fantasy genre, though urban fantasy is growing up, acquiring its own identity and standards, separate from its roots, and the Garrett books, for instance, don't take place in the "real world" (or a recognizable analog), but rather in a true fantasy setting, so there's some clear differentiation. Much of urban fantasy now has a female protagonist who kicks ass, takes names, and the underlying messages tend to have to do with being a strong woman, what that means and the difficulties that arise. Urban fantasy is also blending into the paranormal romance genre a bit.
What I call noir fantasy, however, while sharing many of the same elements of setting, has much more in common with the mystery genre than romance. Protagonists are often male, although this isn't a necessary feature of the genre. Narration is still usually in first person, but there is usually a lessened focus on relationships and a stronger focus on solving a problem. Both genres deal with tough choices, and broad-impact, saving-the-world type plots aren't the distinctive domain of either, and the tone of both genres is often quite dark, with characters who toe the line between good and evil, but I personally enjoy the noir-ish subsection of urban fantasy more than the more romance-driven works.