Every once in a while, a new sub-genre of fantasy forms, like a volcanic island from a huge and volatile chamber of creative magma. It gave us grimdark, gaslamp fantasy and steampunk. Grimdark was forged out of the Warhammer 40,000 tagline, “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.” Gaslamp fantasy was coined by author and illustrator Kaja Foglio to describe her Girl Genius webcomic series. The stories of K.W. Jeter, Morlock Night and The Infernal Devices are examples of works he defined as steampunk.

On each occasion creating new subgenres has been a result of a creative’s needs to define a new form of fantasy literature, a form that breaks the conventional mode of storytelling. Originally labelled ‘fantastic noir’, the first stories to fall into this category were Sweet Silver Blues by Glen Cook, Stalking the Unicorn by Mike Resnick and Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf.

The genre of ‘noir fiction’ began in the 1930s and 40s, as a result of the Great Depression, Prohibition and World War Two – when the world turned darker. These were the tales of world-weary detectives, given life by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane. In each case, their investigations took place in dark, dingy city landscapes, where corruption was rife and mysteries involved murder, morally grey decisions and pervasive danger, always with our troubled protagonist the classic anti-hero whose life was more complex than the mysteries being investigated.

Noir fantasy extended this world into realms where magic played its part in sustaining the mystery as well as the danger. It could happen in urban fantasy and second world fantasy equally as well. The popularity of this subgenre centres on, like its predecessor, the solving of the mystery. The differences lie in the story’s basic premise, its unique world building that facilitates the puzzling landscape and the factors which sour our investigating protagonist. The reader follows the story not only for its fantastical features but to try to unravel the mystery – as we’ve always done with Agatha Christie. Except now, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple are bitter and disillusioned private investigators, police officers or agents for government agencies confronting evil in supernatural forms.

So what makes noir fantasy unique? What does a story need to constitute as noir fantasy? We’ve narrowed it down to four things and we’ve invited four of our friends from Spotlight Indie to illustrate them from their stories.

The first noir fantasy ingredient is the protagonist. Raymond Chandler created Philip Marlowe, Dashiell Hammett’s was Sam Spade. In noir fantasy this character investigates mysteries in some capacity but does so with a dark and complex background that leads to cynicism and bitterness. They may try to do the best they can but their frailties defeat them.

Keith W Dickinson’s steampunk story, Dexter and Sinister offers a great example. “John Sinister is not having a good week. Hired to look into some shady goings on at the airship factory, his investigation has barely begun before people start dying. Soon he’s on the wrong side of some fairly unpleasant people, and that’s before he meets Dexter, the world’s only walking, talking, mechanical cat. That’s when things get complicated.

With secret societies, arrogant aristocrats, and criminal chocolatiers to contend with, John and Dexter will have to keep their wits about them if they’re going to come out of this alive. And if John happens to fall in love with his employer’s daughter along the way, well nobody said catching a killer was going to be easy now did they?”

Keith defines the noir fantasy protagonist in this way: “Noir in fantasy is the same as noir everywhere else; a flawed hero gets involved in something they shouldn’t, often to the detriment of themselves and others, ultimately doing the right thing even when it goes against their best interests. The difference is the tropes. In steampunk noir the villain is an industrialist, people travel by velocipede and use steam-powered mobile phones, the hero’s sidekick is a talking mechanical cat, but other than that the rules remain the same: The world-weary detective investigates, unearths clues, gets in trouble, almost gets killed, yet somehow triumphs through wit, skill, and a large amount of luck. Plus, airships. You’ve got to have airships, otherwise the readers will never forgive you.”

Keith’s definition acknowledges the importance of the sidekick, the enabler, the exposition assistant, the sounding board. It’s Dr Watson to Sherlock Holmes or Captain Hastings to Hercule Poirot. In Keith’s novel, it’s a mechanical cat. The faults, the angst, the foibles of the story’s hero is often best seen through the eyes of the assistant who is the one who points out the mistakes, the difficult choices and asks the questions that likely leads to the mystery being solved.

Another example comes from David Craig, author of his Sooty Feathers series starting with The Resurrection Men. It’s a story set in a secondary world of steampunk fantasy, and our second example takes us back in time, to a variant of Glasgow in the nineteenth century.

“Wilton Hunt, a student, and Tam Foley, a laudanum-addicted pharmacist, are pursuing extra-curricular careers as body snatchers, or ‘resurrection men’, under cover of darkness. They exhume a girl’s corpse, only for it to disappear while their backs are turned. Confused and in need of the money the body would have earnt them, they investigate the corpse’s disappearance. They discover that bodies have started to turn up in the area with ripped-out throats and severe loss of blood, although not the one they lost. The police are being encouraged by powerful people to look the other way, and the deaths are going unreported by the press. As Hunt and Foley delve beneath the veneer of respectable society, they find themselves entangled in a dangerous underworld that is protected from scrutiny by the rich and powerful members of the elite but secretive Sooty Feathers Club.

Meanwhile, a mysterious circus arrives in the middle of the night, summoned as allies to help avenge a betrayal two centuries old…”

Our second ingredient that defines noir fantasy is the moral ambiguity – the trademark of Chandler, Spillane and Hammett.

“Moral ambiguity is something that make a fantasy ‘noir’ in my opinion, where it can be more ‘us vs them’ rather than ‘good vs evil’. In my Resurrection Men, set in Victorian Glasgow, the protagonists are body snatchers, exhuming bodies to sell to an anatomy professor. There is also a dark secret regarding one of them, which he does not learn of until book 2. In the later volumes, the protagonists have to ally themselves with supernatural beings not much better than the ones they are fighting. So having to choose the ‘lesser evil’ can be an element of Noir fantasy.”

We shouldn’t confuse the range of traditional anti-heroes in this definition. Many of them inhabit morally grey worlds, grimdark stories are full of them. In noir fantasy, it is the angst that goes with those decisions that count. These protagonists want to do right but, to solve the mystery, such decisions get compromised, bent out of shape, leaving the main character suffering from the consequences of those decisions. As David points out, often the main character is forced to adopt the ‘lesser evil’ in order to win the day.

The next ingredient of noir fantasy comes from Simon Kewin whose Office of the Witchfinder General series begins with The Eye Collectors. That ingredient is darkness. We’re not only talking about a lack of light here, we’re talking a lack of hope too, we’re going bleak.

“When Danesh Shahzan gets called to a crime scene, it’s usually because the police suspect not just foul play but unnatural forces at play.

Danesh is an Acolyte in His Majesty’s Office of the Witchfinder General, a shadowy arm of the British government fighting supernatural threats to the realm. This time, he’s been called in by Detective Inspector Nikola Zubrasky to investigate a murder in Cardiff. The victim had been placed inside a runic circle and their eyes carefully removed from their head. Danesh soon confirms that magical forces are at work. Concerned that there may be more victims to come, he and DI Zubrasky establish a wary collaboration as they each pursue the investigation within the constraints of their respective organisations. Soon Danesh learns that there may be much wider implications to what is taking place and that somehow he has an unexpected connection. He also realises something about himself that he can never admit to the people with whom he works…”

In this urban fantasy darkness takes the form of the shadowy activities of not only the evil influences – but also those who are supposed to be keeping us safe. That’s the starting point but, as Simon points out, working with such uncertain, unsafe and unprincipled environment leaves the protagonist in hopeless situations.

“For me, “noir” implies a tone of bleakness, moral ambiguity, maybe snarky cynicism in a story that quite often involves crime investigation, while “fantasy” means fiction with some kind of magic going on. Fantasy noir, then, is work that combines the two in interesting ways: maybe a troubled magic user battling sinister forces in a fantasy world, maybe someone in our own world who steps into the shadows to face ineffable horrors. In my own Office of the Witchfinder General books, I tried to both these things, as my investigator hero faces grim supernatural threats – while he also tries to come to terms with who and what he is.”

That darkness, the bleak setting often provokes a type of humour associated with such cynicism – snarky humour. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe had a catalogue full of them: “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.” “From 30 feet away, she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”

Our fourth and final noir fantasy ingredient is demonstrated in my own series – The British Bureau for the Arcane. Another secret government agency that operates in the shadows. That ingredient is corruption – which ensures the protagonist (as well as the reader) never knows who to trust. Everyone lies, often the mystery is solved by determining the motivations.

“The British Bureau for the Arcane has kept people safe for centuries from the arcane species that seek to harm human beings. Their range extends to Commonwealth nations that were part of the British Empire. A once-proud part of the British Secret Service, their success in controlling the arcane races has been their downfall. These beings now live on the edge of survival in remote parts of Britain. Or, at least they did.

For Arlo Austin, a loyal but troubled agent for the Bureau, something is wrong. When he’s sent to protect the citizens of the Shetland Isles from rampaging Norwegian trolls, it soon becomes apparent it was an attempt on his life. When another agent dies in mysterious circumstances, and Arlo is warned of an impending war with arcane species, his instincts are proved right.

But who is behind this rebellion? Could it be linked to Arlo’s own bloodline as a Dark Elf? His traumatic childhood holds secrets, ones that are going to test his loyalty to the Bureau. In their cells, another Dark Elf is held prisoner, one who is so despised by its staff, their hatred has extended to Arlo. This species is violent and vengeful, can they recruit one of their own to bring about the destruction of the Bureau? And in so doing, enable the arcane races to wage war against the human race.”

In my stories corruption takes many forms; twisted loyalties, a need for power and control, vengeance. Corruption exists in so many forms in noir fantasy so it enables the plot to feature red herrings, a range of suspects and conflicting motivations. Nothing is as it seems, no one can be trusted. Corruption manifests on the micro level, such as rivalry or a petty grudge; it can operate on a macro level, where treachery places large populations in danger.

Corruption in my stories centre on a lack of trust particularly. It operates within the Bureau, where politics plays a key role. Beyond it, the arcane races may be equally as corrupt or driven to acts of desperation which promote corruption by others. My stories are inspired by beings from British folklore so the reservoir of such arcane beings is a rich source.

Conclusion

We’ve defined noir fantasy with four ingredients: the flawed hero, moral ambiguity, a darkness provoked by a bleak, hopeless landscape and pervasive corruption.

When you consider how popular murder mysteries have always been, there arrival into the  fantasy genre isn’t surprising. It’s another way of telling a story but with ingredients borrowed from another genre. For this reason, it’s likely noir fantasy will be around for a long time.

Here are a few more noir fantasy novels that come highly recommended:

• There’s the gritty, and emotionally heart-breaking Legacy of the Brightwash by Krystle Matar where Tashué must defend the corrupt legal system that’s taken his best friend and his son
• The hilarious adventures of GM Nair’s Duckett & Dyer: Dicks for Hire, a story that will lift your mood and have you giggling throughout
• The Hallows by HL Tinsley, a grimdark tale where Cam, an assessor for the Providence Company, investigates gruesome murders, assisted by gun-toting, floating nuns
• Kept from Cages by Phil Williams has FBI agent Sean Tasker searching for answers from Louisiana, to rural England and the darkest jungles of Africa in a story that is part urban fantasy, part horror
• The steampunk fantasy, Madame Antic’s Hotel Grotesque by Milo James Fowler takes place in an alternate Victorian era where its protagonist must solve the mysteries if he is to regain the former life he lost
• Darian Smith’s Kalanon Rising takes place in a secondary world where the Bloodhawk must find the murderer who’s killed the king’s cousin, before monsters and mayhem destroys everything