Maltese Falcon Movie Poster

I’ve been fascinated by Film Noir since I was an early teen.  My first glimpse of the genre was “The Maltese Falcon” starring Humphrey Bogart.  I can remember sitting in my basement with my father and being riveted by the movie.  Black and white films have this quality about them that is hard to come by with color films.  Perhaps because with black and white it’s all about the lighting.  With Noir films the lighting is even more important because of the lack of bright scenes; most of the film is dark to fit the mood of it.

The term Noir has always fascinated me as well.  Noir, the french word for black, was first used by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, when discussing some of Hollywood’s films.  From then on, Noir grew and expanded in curious ways.  No two people can seem to agree what exactly constitutes a Film Noir.  Though there are some themes that seem to be universal through out.

• The Average Joe Protagonist – Average Joe as the protagonist allows us to use his eyes to see the darkness of life and to bring it into plain sight.  Average Joe is just that, average, nothing special, he could be any of us and that’s why the people watching identify with him and the terrible things he sees as the story unfolds.
• The Femme Fatale – A woman who isn’t afraid to use her charms to get what she wants.  Sometimes the Femme Fatale is doing it on purpose because she can’t see any other way to get what she wants.  Sometimes she gets her way without realizing it’s because she’s so good at seducing men. (Though how you could be unaware of this is truly beyond this non-femme fatale.)
• The Seedy Plot – Whether it’s extortion, murder, sex crimes or any other number of despicable things, the plot of a Film Noir is all about Average Joe being hired either by the Femme Fatale or someone else and getting in over his head in a situation that he’s usually woefully under prepared to deal with.  Be it a dead body in his place, a Femme Fatale tempting him to do the wrong thing even though it feels so right, extortion by the highest bidder or all of the above, Average Joe has to use his average wits to get out of the seedy plot he finds himself mired in.  Some Noir end on a tragic note, with no real justice done, while others end with a more positive take, like Average Joe getting the non-femme fatale as a prize for finally exposing the bad guys to the authorities.

Film Noir were usually taken, at least in part, from Hardboiled detective novels from around that same time period. Hardboiled novels are just that, stories that show you the hard truths of the criminal side of things as viewed by a protagonist who isn’t a hero, just someone trying to live life without going under.

All of this, is leading somewhere in my mind, which is usually full of twists and turns.  And that is, of course, the title of this entry, Fantasy Noir.

The Fantasy genre is one of magic and other things of myth that are of a fantastic nature.  Basically anything that isn’t possible in our world is fantasy. (Science Fiction being things that could be possible through science and technology, if given time for us as a race to achieve those things.)

So what do we get when we put together Fantasy and Noir?  Why we get a sword wielding mercenary who gets hired by a Femme Fatale to recover her lost magical artifact and instead gets imprisoned by a blood thirsty warlock who is going to use him as a sacrifice in order to summon forth unimaginable powers, of course!

I only recently came up with that lovely combination myself.  Sadly I wasn’t the first to do so, however, it would seem that Fantasy Noir isn’t something that many others think to do with their writing and film making.

Blade Runner Cover

Though Blade Runner was hardly fantasy, it is certainly a new spin on the Noir Genre, something they call Science Fiction Noir. A futuristic setting, but a similar take on a bleak world with an “Average Joe” protagonist who ends up in the middle of a struggle that he really never intended to get involved in. The twist of the main character, Rick Deckard, in Blade Runner was that he originally worked to put down rogue synthetic humans and yet he finds himself, after retiring, being asked to do it again and in the process falling in love with a woman that he can almost believe isn’t a synthetic. Blade Runner was even more progressive, I suppose you can call it, because it is also labeled cyberpunk due to its technology driven yet slum-like atmosphere.

Now back to Fantasy Noir. The idea came to me on a whim when a friend teasingly challenged me to write something for a World of Warcraft character that would be set in a rainy, steamy atmosphere with lots of bluesy, saxaphone music as a back drop. How could I resist such a challenge? I wrote a short story about my night elf rogue trying to drown her sorrows in a bottle of whiskey while it poured rain outside. The setting was a jungle port and the tone of the story was more sexual than bleak, mostly because as the story progresses, my character reveals she almost slept with a total stranger because he intrigued her but ends up drinking alone because the local enforcers show up to cart the man away for the extortion of pretty women.

I liked that story so much, I wanted to write more. Sadly, unless I feel like never publishing such stories ever, I couldn’t continue to use World of Warcraft as my setting. So I ripped my character out of that setting, made her into a “jungle” elf, and started up a story I’m currently calling “Five Finger Discount”. I might change the title, but the gist of the story is my character dealing with being used as a pawn and she doesn’t know why and likely never will know why, even at the end.

I was curious to know if anyone else had ideas like mine, so I started doing some research on Fantasy Noir. I came up with a two blog posts discussing Fantasy Noir as it applies to Urban Fantasy. I even stumbled on a post discussing making a D&D game using Noir in a fantasy setting. And then I finally stumbled upon something that was almost exactly what I was looking for.

An author by the name of Alex Bledsoe, has written a high fantasy noir book by the name of The Sword-Edged Blonde.  I’ll be getting my hands on this book as soon as I can because I am truly curious to see just how he combined High Fantasy and Noir.

Though my story won’t be an exact take on noir/hardboiled style, I’m hoping it will at least give that sense as I plunge my readers into a world of elves and wizards and average people who don’t look too closely at the otherside for fear they see themselves all too clearly.

Tags: Fantasy, fantasy noir, Writing