In a post on the SFWA blog, May Haddad offers advice for blending noir with fantastist genres. “Fantastic noir is a subgenre that blends film noir or its literary inspiration and counterpart, hardboiled fiction and roman noir (respectively), with the more outlandish elements of speculative fiction,” she explains. To ensure that your genre elements mesh, Haddad suggests keeping these rules in mind:
- Your story needs internal logic. “No matter how outlandish the speculative fiction elements that are introduced are, hardboiled fiction needs to make sense if you want to keep the audience invested in the plot,'” she explains.
- The aesthetics need to mesh. You can work with any combination, but the combination needs to work. Execution matters.
- One genre shouldn’t drown out the other. “In order to establish a balance in this regard, it helps to rein in the scope of the story and the speculative elements, especially if the protagonists and antagonists possess supernatural abilities, in order to keep things grounded,” Haddad recommends.
- Be creative. Many cross-genre novels fail because they don’t leverage the speculative elements. “The outlandish elements need to be factored into the story in a meaningful way, or else you’ll end up with a by-the-numbers plot with speculative salad dressing,” Haddad explains.
- The backstory needs to be thought out. If you want your reader to buy into your premise, characters and story world matter.
- You don’t necessarily need a mystery. Hard-boiled and noir stories often focus on private detectives and femme fatales, but you don’t have to. Think of noir as attitude and tone, and you can create almost any kind of story with a hard-boiled flavor.
