My favorite books that blend speculative fiction and noir fiction

As independent genres, science fiction and noir are both interested in exploration, not only of plot mysteries or the rules of a new and different setting, but also of deeper truths about the human condition. The Body Scout has a futuristic NYC where body modification is the norm, and an affecting detective story, which both examine how we relate to our bodies. From labor to narcotics to aesthetics to sex and desire, the book explores how we view and treat our own bodies and others, and how our social structures exploit them.

In critiquing the failures of our institutions, noir necessarily spends a lot of time in society’s underbelly. Almost everyone in the cast is morally gray, if not on the darker shade of the spectrum. That’s what we get from Certain Dark Things, which takes the narco gang wars in Mexico City, and instead of cartels, we get vampire clans, each with their own agendas and rules. For the protagonist Atl, a young female vampire on the run, the pull of the criminal underworld seems inescapable, and in her struggle we see the complications and the horrors of escaping one’s past.

At the center of many noir stories is a flawed detective—sometimes they’re depressed, often they have a drinking problem. They’re unreliable, but they are competent—and this tension from a point-of-view character is brought to the fore in The Paradox Hotel, where the protagonist is saddled with the grief of a lost love, a hard edge to her personality, and a condition that has her perception “unstuck” in time. The book uses the science fiction element of time travel to show how that technology might alter one’s memories and experiences (and thus one’s emotions and choices), and in doing so seamlessly blends the strengths of both genres.

Noir can sometimes be hard to identify, but most readers are familiar with the tropes: the put-upon private investigator, the case that he can’t walk away from, the hunt for leads, the twists and double-crosses. With Hammers on Bone, we get all the aesthetics of a hardboiled detective story but also: Lovecraftian monsters. Noir stories lay bare individual and collective moral failings, and in adding eldritch horrors, the book further externalizes those ills, showing how monstrous humans can be.

Hammers on Bone by Cassandra Khaw is a novella that melds the hardboiled detective novel with Lovecraftian monsters. Our private dick, John Persons, is hired by a ten-year-old kid to off his abusive stepfather. From this classic noir setup, to the character voice and dialect, to the shady characters, to the twists and reversals, this book really keys into the strengths of the genre, and amplifies them even further with the visceral horrors of imaginary beasts.

As a reader, I am drawn to both noir and science fiction because they are both puzzles. They present a mystery seeking an answer, whether it is a question about the rules of a strange new world, or the question of who killed who and how. In Far from the Light of Heaven, we start with a locked room murder mystery set on an interstellar vessel. The seemingly impossible crime is enough to keep one reading to the end, but then the book provides other, more enticing mysteries that grow in scale and scope the deeper the story goes.