Larry’s Introduction
This was Kacey’s idea. Our first collection of noir-themed fantasy and sci-fi stories was called Noir Fatale, and it came out amazing. For that one our theme was the femme fatale. For our second volume we decided to focus on the next big noir archetype, the detective.
I think Raymond Chandler provided the best description of this type of character:
But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.
He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.
—Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder 1950
And that is what these authors have strived to deliver.
We assembled a crew of extremely talented storytellers. Their stories are all in wildly different settings, from sci-fi, to fantasy, urban fantasy, or alternate history, and they vary greatly in tone and feeling, but all of them feature characters who are solvers of crimes or righters of wrongs, with their own—sometimes peculiar—code of honor.
I hope you enjoy reading these as much as Kacey and I did while putting them together. I’m proud of this anthology.
If you find a story in here you particularly enjoy I’d encourage you to check out more of that author’s work. Half of the fun of anthologies is discovering new writers to read, and we’ve got some amazing ones here. It’s been an honor to work with them.
—Larry Correia