Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations

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The subgenre that came to be known as “urban fantasy” was the most popular type of fantasy—perhaps fiction as a whole—of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Although full of action-adventure and horror’s supernatural beings—vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, ghosts, witches, et al—it really owed more to mystery than any other genre, especially the hard-boiled or noir detective mystery. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, and their fictional counterparts are close literary kin to today’s vampire slayers, demon hunters, wizardly private eyes, and other paranormal protagonists.

Just as with urban fantasy’s heroes and heroines, the hard-boilers were outsiders. They took a lot of physical punishment, and dished out just as much. They adhered to individual moral codes, even when doing so broke traditional societal rules. Their turf was the city: the epicenter of all that is unnatural, wicked, and perverse in the world. When you fight evil all the time, you wind up cynical and tend toward sarcasm and wisecracks . . .

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