For the next couple days, you can pre-order my upcoming novel Good Things Are Coming Your Way from Barnes & Noble for 25 percent off with the code PREORDER25. (Must be a B&N member.) Good Things is about a magical social worker and a time-traveling witch who team up to protect the timeline… and fall in love!

You can still order my upcoming comic book Star Trek: Zero Point from your local comic book store and elsewhere — the first issue is out Oct. 14!

You can get Lessons in Magic and Disaster in paperback wherever you get books, or a signed copy from Green Apple.

We’re doing another Bookstore and Chocolate Crawl on Sept. 19!

Fuck Noir

Recently I had a one month free trial of Amazon Prime, which I used to watch the excellent Ride or Die and catch up on a couple other shows. At a certain point, I thought: I should watch Spider-Noir, because I'd heard a lot about it and I love the Spiderverse movies. 

And then I was like... but why? Do I really need to watch this show? I kind of realized that deep down, I really did not need or want to watch a noir take on Spider-Man. So, dear reader, I skipped it.

Around that time, I had a realization: I am sick of noir. I feel as though noir aesthetics and vibes, especially, are overused to the point of blandness. It's wallpaper! It's elevator music! Moreover, any work that attempts to capture the surface appearance or stylistic elements of noir is doomed to become pastiche.

I used to love noir. As a kid, I watched a ton of movies with Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre, and I was pretty obsessed. I saw The Third Man at an  impressionable age and it's still one of my favorite movies. In my early twenties, I read every book I could get my hands on by Chandler, Hammett, Spillane and a ton of other authors. I had all of Frank Miller's Sin City collections, and was among the first to see the movies in theaters. 

And when urban fantasy took a somewhat noir turn, thanks to authors like Richard Kadrey, I was into it. I loved the idea of adding fantasy elements to all the tropes of a hard-bitten gumshoe in a broken city. 

I think my feelings about noir started to shift when I tried my hand at writing one of those noir urban fantasy novels myself. I drew on my love of the classics, absolutely including Hammett and Chandler, and came up with a story about a corrupt magical establishment and a criminal underworld in a dark twisted version of New York city. The main female character was a little bit femme fatale and a little bit damsel in distress, and she didn't have much perspective of her own. 

This is the only novel I've ever written and decided to put in a drawer. I have a few other unpublished novels that I tried incredibly hard to find an agent or an indie publisher for — but when it came to the urban fantasy book, I simply decided it wasn't good enough. I'm very grateful to myself for making that decision, because when I look back at it now, it really hurts to read. Apart from the worst major female lead I've ever written, that novel had a host of flaws, many of which stemmed from excessive fealty to the tropes and attitudes of 1940s and 1950s fiction.

I ended up feeling that noir had some interesting elements that you could lift and use in a story now, but there was absolutely no need to reproduce every aspect of noir in the 21st century. And that's still how I feel. 

My decision not to watch Spider-Noir was informed, in part, by reading a few reviews that did suggest that it was indeed kind of a pastiche: focused on reproducing the imagery or ethos of noir rather than telling a real story.

It didn't help that most of the positive press coverage focused entirely on the techniques used to create a TV show that you could watch in either black and white or color, which felt kind of pointless to me. I even read an article with an “actors' roundtable” where a group of actors were being interviewed about acting — every other actor was asked an insightful question about their character, but poor Lamorne Morris only got questions about the bloody black-and-white-and-color filming. As if to confirm that there was nothing else interesting about his show, or his role in it.

I also struggled to get through the recent Star Trek episode, "A Case Of Chiaroscuro," which was filmed in black and white and felt very much like a spoof that had somehow been stretched out to episode length. I enjoyed Batman: Caped Crusader a lot, and its 1940s setting felt somewhat justified since Batman comes from that era originally. Plus Caped Crusader does have some truly excellent female characters, including Montoya. But even that started to feel a bit too noir for me by the end of the second season.

Another nail in the noir coffin was learning more about the creative process that led to the ill-fated Solo: a Star Wars Story — and realizing that one of the movie’s huge problems was a determination to do a noir homage. Emilia Clarke’s character Qi’ra, in particular, was jammed into a “femme fatale” archetype that meant she didn’t really get to be a fully-developed character.

I believe that the things I love about noir can be preserved, but we can jettison all of the imagery and outdated stereotypes that originally were part of it. 

What I love about noir is the cynicism. The bleakness. The awareness that corruption is everywhere, and everyone is complicit to some degree. That violence is not something that happens to other people, but rather a key feature of the system that we all support. These notions are pretty perfect for the time we're living through, a time of incredible corruption, blatant state-sponsored violence, and worsening levels of inequality and plutocracy.

But… I don't know anyone who dresses in 1940s clothes. I also don't know any femme fatales, or dames with legs that go on for days — which sounds like something you might want to get a doctor to look at. There aren't really any private detectives in fedoras and trench coats walking around either, and almost nobody I know smokes these days. The world is in color! 

Part of what I’m tired of with noir is definitely the gender stereotypes and other old-timey attitudes that sometimes come with a an excessively accurate recreation of old-school noir. I already talked about how I myself wrote a novel with a garbage female lead because I was trying too hard to be faithful to the genre. (My novel also had another major female character who was kind of a Frank Miller-style lady badass. We shall speak of her no more.) 

But I also just find the aesthetic… overdone. It's why I've never been able to get into the original Cowboy Bebop anime, which also feels like it's trying way too hard to look like a 1940s movie.

I almost think that the noir aesthetic is at odds with the noir ethos — because the aesthetic is fundamentally conservative and designed to lull you with familiarity, while the awareness of pervasive corruption and systemic violence really ought to wake you the fuck up.

Which is where cyberpunk comes in. Cyberpunk, to my mind, actually did a pretty good job of lifting noir attitudes without being overly fetishistic about the old fashioned private-dick schtick. Some cyberpunk did feature hackers who, to my mind, occupy that gumshoe role in the story. And you might see the occasional femme fatale in cyberpunk. But cyberpunk takes place in a colorful neon future and contains a world that is weirder and stylized in a very different way than regular noir, while still keeping the sense of paranoia and ubiquitous injustice. (I should also note that Richard Kadrey, whom I mentioned earlier, started in cyberpunk and brought some of that skill in handling tropes sensitively to his excellent urban fantasy work.)

So yeah, I crave more stories about corruption and the inherent violence of a society dominated by the rich and powerful. I also would really love for those stories to feature groups of people who stand up to the oppressors, rather than just one tough guy. I want my dark stories of mean streets to include queers, feminists, the disabled and tons of three-dimensional people of color. Nothing ever needs to be in black and white ever again, unless you're watching the masterpiece that is Prince's Under The Cherry Moon.

Music I Love Right Now 

Guitarist Charlie Hunter used to be part of a jazz group called T.J. Kirk, which did incredible instrumental covers of James Brown, Thelonious Monk, and Rahsaan Roland kirk. Their music is incredible, you should check it out. Hunter was also part of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. 

Last year, Hunter did a collaboration with fellow guitarist Ella feingold called Different Strokes for Different Folks, which my friend Mimi suggested I check out and which absolutely slaps. It's as awesome as the T.J. Kirk stuff, but feels more like an homage to old-school funk and jazz rather than cover versions. (The opening track is a gorgeous Sly Stone tribute.) The sheer density of virtuoso guitar playing is astonishing, and the two of them slide into some really amazing grooves. I highly recommend it. It's on Bandcamp — and Bandcamp Friday is coming up on October 2. Just sayin’.