Welcome to Noir Week at Tor.com! Join us as we escape from the sweltering dog days of summer into the cool, shadowy underworld of back alleys, jazz joints, hardboiled hooligans and tough-talking femme fatales; a world filled with violence, glamour, and intrigue, where the color scheme is black and white and the rules are anything but….
This week, we’re making the most of our “And related subjects” tagline and branching out into new territory: in addition to our regular content, we’ve got posts on some of our favorite classic noir movies, writers, iconic characters and actors. Less a genre than a style, noir continues to be an iconic and influential force in fiction, film, and fashion and we’re taking a detour all the way down to its shady, whiskey-soaked roots—so grab your fedora, slip your pearl-handled pistol into your purse, and brush off your best Bogart impression: it’s going to be a wild ride.
We’ll be trailing Philip Marlowe, hunting down The Third Man, sampling some Soylent Green, and swinging through Chinatown and Dark City on the way for all these posts and much more, keep an eye on the Noir Week Index.
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Noel Clarke (Mickey from “Doctor Who”) in Reign of Death.
So why isn’t this series over at your Criminal Elements site?
Will you cover sf and fantasy works that are within this genre, ie Glen Cook’s Garrett PI series?
Or did you just develop a terrible case of mission creep?
We will be covering some SF/F noir works as well.
Not so much mission creep as strecthing our “The Universe. And related subjects.” wings.
Might consider the Nightside series from Simon Greene. Definitely some noir elements to it.
My two favorite things in the world come together, noir and Tor.com!
Noir Week is almost up and there’s been no mention of Kim Newman’s first novel, The Night Mayor, which, as a kind of mash-up of film noir and Ubik, seems a natural for this site. It didn’t work too well for me as an SF adventure, but as a homage to film noir, it was a lot of fun to read. A sample: