Josh Jasper

Best New Hardboiled Fantasy

Today marks the release of Harry Connolly's debut novel Child of Fire.  Writing about books like this is why I jumped at the change to blog for Genreville.  I've been a fan of the melding of the sensibilities of Dashiel Hammet and fantasy novels for ages.  Most books crossing fantasy and noir sensibilities, however, have focused on the "knight in rusty armor" concept, with the hero as a Sam Spade style private investigator.  Jim Butcher's incredibly popular Dresden Files novels have taken the lead in this sort of book. While I love Harry Dresden, there's a place that the Dresden Files don't go that I like to see sometimes.  It's the dark side of noir fiction, where characters are grim anti-heroes, and the job they're doing is not always heroic.  Novels like Chandler's The Big Sleep exemplify this.  The protagonist's code of honor is stretched in books like this, the ends are resolutions more than victories, and the moral taint of the means to the end wears on the hero. 

Child of Fire manages to accomplish this.  From the start, Connolly's protagonist, Ray Lilly, is not someone likable, but he's introspective, and his internal dialogue is engaging.  I didn't like him, but I wanted to know what happened to him, and found myself caring about him when he got into danger in spite of who he was.  Annalise Powliss, who acts as Ray's commanding officer and parole officer, is also not a nice person.  I had less empathy for her than I did for Ray, but she was so well written that I found myself rooting for her as well.  There's less of a sense of who's a good guy and who's a bad guy, and more of a sense of who's a supernatural executioner, and who's a tool of Lovecraft-grade evil from outside of space and time.

The book is a straightforward hunt for an evil magician who's made a deal with an even more evil supernatural being from another plane of existence.  Annalise is a member of the Twenty Palace Society, and Ray is her stalking horse or "wooden man", driver, and manservant.  Ray has one single spell, and some magical protections tattooed onto him.  Annalise is a full fledged magician.  They have to fight thier way through a variety of magical oponents, find out where the link to the big supernatural evil is anchored, kill the magician who made the deal, and destroy his spellbooks.  As far as plots for urban fantasy with a noir element go, this is fairly simple.  The antagonism between Annalise and Ray provides for an interesting subplot, but doesn't dominate.  What's so great about the book isn't that it's doing anything exciting with plot, but rather that it's doing something genuine and in many ways refreshing with how it presents the action, and in the style of the book.

Connolly dosen't have the same theatrically interesting violence that you'll see in Butcher's Dresden Files novels.  Fight scenes in Butcher's prose are exciting, dramatic and fun, like a good Kung Fu movie.  Sometimes innocents get hurt, but they're usually dead as an object lesson to the hero.  Collateral damage in Connolly's writing is just that, unintended, meaningless, and distressing.  Innocents die, and other than feeling a bit bad, Ray isn't learning the valuable life lessons that Harry Dresden often does.  This isn't to say that the action scenes aren't exciting.  They're extremely well written, and quite captivating.  But they're not heroic. 

One other thing that Connolly doesen't do is romance.  In an interview on John Scalzi's Whatever, Connolly talks about "negative space" in his writing process: areas that he knew he wasn't going to write about that helped form what he did write about.  From my perspective, romance is part of that.  Sex does play a part in the books, but it's about physical need more than emotional tenderness, and this is presented in the same way that Ray Lilly's other less-than-sympathetic personality traits are presented.  Ray dosen't fall in love with anyone.  His relationship with Annalise is nonsexual and nonromantic. I wish this weren't so refreshing a change.  I think romantic and sexual tension is overplayed in most novels similar to Child of Fire.  To contrast with that, sex in Child of Fire is somehow tainted in the books, and there's no romance for the main characters whatsoever.  And finally, it's nice to see Annalise as a powerful woman who's not sexualized. 

I'll be eagerly awaiting more from Connolly.  You can buy Child of Fire at Harry's blog.  I'll be following this with more on urban fantasy/noir fantasy, including the author interviews, and a review of a Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim in audiobook format from Brilliance Audio.

Posted by Josh Jasper on September 29, 2009 | Comments (3)