Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway
If Neuromancer and The Long Goodbye had a love child
I love the genre of noir and its cousin, hard-boiled1. Give me a world-weary detective, a femme fatale, a mysterious corpse, and a city on the brink, and I’m all yours. I’m also a big fan of sci-fi and fantasy, though I’m perhaps a bit more particular in those tastes: I like it when the author makes one or two significant changes to a world we know and then plays out the consequences. Thus, I was predisposed to either be delighted or disappointed by Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway, a novel that blends all of the above.
Fortunately, it was the former. Put on your trilby, light an unfiltered cigarette, and lets dive in.
Quick Take
Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway
My rating: ★★★★,☆/★ (4.5 / 5)
Length: 257 pp. • Tone: Noir, stylistic, pulpy
In one line: Noir and sci-fi blend perfectly in this fun, modern take on a standard formula.
Spoiler-Free Summary
Cal Sounder is a detective-for-hire who often consults with the police on the most sensitive of cases. Specifically, he is called in on crimes involving Titans, humans who have undergone immensely expensive genetic therapy to become taller, stronger, invulnerable, and essentially immortal. Cal is called in to investigate the death of Roddy Tebbit, a 7 foot tall Titan who is found shot in his apartment, with no sign of struggle and a single gunshot wound to the side of his head. Is it suicide? Murder? Or something more sinister? Who is Roddy Tebbit, and how did he afford the Titan treatment? Cal follows down all of these questions, but the answers might be more dangerous, and more personal, than he thought possible.
Every week, a fresh case drops with twisted tales, shady characters, and just enough light to see the danger coming. Subscribe, kid. It’s the only way to stay one step ahead of the dark.
What Worked
This novel just drips with style. It’ll make you think sci-fi and hard-boiled were always meant to go together. Harkaway blends them together seamlessly, never leaning so hard in one direction that the other is neglected. However, just for fun, I pulled a list of the 11 elements of writing noir, and thought we could examine how Titanium Noir fits each:
The Outsider: Cal Sounder doesn’t fit in anywhere. He works with the police, but isn’t a cop himself. He rubs elbows with the ultra rich, but has to take cheating spouse surveillance jobs to make rent. He frequents seedy dive bars, but never partakes in the debauchery unless forced. Element 1, check.
No Heroes: In classic noir, the protagonist is not a hero. Even if they have the most calibrated moral compass of all the characters, it’s still going to be off by a few degrees. Cal, once again, fits here. He wrestles with decisions of who to give his loyalty to, and the choices include ultra wealthy corporate magnates, underworld crime lords, irascible police chiefs, and more. He doesn’t see a clear winner.
Fatalism/Nihilism: Hope has no place in the world of noir. Cal’s world view supports this. He’s not angry at the inequalities of his world, because that’s just the way things are. You can’t get mad at it any more than you can be mad at the sun for being hot, in his mind. You just keep moving along.
Femme Fatale: Yep. Athena Tonfamecasca, Cal’s former lover turned Titan, daughter of Titan inventor/gatekeeper Stefan Tonfamecasca. Cal and Athena being together can only lead to tragedy, they both know it, and yet they still flirt with it.
Creatures of the Night: This is a weird element to list, but sure, a lot of things happen at night.
First-person: Yes, Titanium Noir is told from Cal’s first person perspective
The Mystery: Who killed Roddy Tebbit and why? Boom, done.
City Streets: Another weird one, but yes, it takes place in a city. Two, in fact.
Violence: Plenty of it.
No Happy Ending: I won’t spoil it, but this depends on your definition.
Pared Back Prose: With a few notable exceptions, the prose in Titanium Noir is snappy, fast, and direct.
Ok, on to the science fiction bits. Titanium Noir does my favorite thing in science-fiction and fantasy, which I mentioned earlier: a one-degree change from a world we recognize. In this case, its the existence of Titans. A lesser writer would just make them into super-powered rich folks, but Harkaway has deeply thought out their existence. What are their faults? What is the transition like? Who gets the treatment? What do normal people think of them? How do they interact with the world? What do Titans like about their new life, and what do they wish they could change? Harkaway has answers to all of it.
One last thing that I loved: the ancillary characters. It’s so often to just read a characters name, vague physical description, then they serve their purpose and move on. Harkaway’s side characters are so vivid and colorful, from the extremely creepy building superintendent to the dive bar owner who carefully controls her establishment’s atmosphere to project chaos and anarchy, while keeping everything under her thumb at all times. Cal Sounder has been around, he’s earned his world-weariness, and he knows all of these folks inside and out. He either came up with them, or he’s met 1000 people like them before.
What Didn’t Work
Occasionally, the plot of Titanium Noir can be a little hard to follow. It’s not that it is so convoluted, but more that Harkaway loves a red herring. He’ll throw you 4 versions of the same story, with no indication which parts of each are true and which are false. It’s fun, in that you get to puzzle these things out in your own mind, but sometimes you forget which thread is being pulled at any given time. Or at least I did2.
I also would have liked to learn just a bit more about Cal’s past. We get precious few nuggets of detail. At one point, Cal even says to us the reader (I’m paraphrasing) “I came in from…well, never mind that”. I think the idea is to give him a bit of mystique, but Cal doesn’t strike me as the kind of character who does mystique. He uncovers truths for a living, he’s seen it all, he’s done with flights of fancy. If Cal were actually telling you this story, I don’t think there’s much he would deem as too private to be told.
Memorable Quotes
“The house always win”
“The house doesn’t even need to win. There’s no game because the house owns everything. The money you bet with, the air you breathe. The myth is that when the wheel spins it’s any different from when it’s standing still.”
Deliciously bleak.
Used to be we liked stories of the Titans’ misdeeds. We would put them out samizdat, shock sheets. Fucking manifestos of condemnation. We were going to wake people to the injustice inherent in the system. All the things you smooth over, we try to highlight. But those stories don’t catch fire anymore. Not that no one cares, but they got fatigue, you know? How many times can you read how rich is Stefan Tonfamecasca, how many hospitals that money could buy, how many schools, before you just expect the world to suck that hard? So now we like good stories about how we do, how our way is better, how it’s natural. It’s slower and less angry, but it works. Little by little, it works.
I really hope so.
I also think…that nice things should be free to nice people and really expensive to assholes, but this is not the day when any of us gets what we want.
Good example of Cal’s resignation.
<Cal is giving his nurse sass, after an accident leaves him and another woman in bad shape, the nurse responds> I know. You talk in your sleep. So listen to me, Cal: if she does live, it’s because of you. If she doesn’t, it’s because of them. I know that look you have. I’ve seen it on soldier boys and cops and firemen and every other kind of desperate life-saving son-of-a-bitch. I will be honest and tell you I see it in the mirror on those days when God in Her wisdom decides to fuck my scorecard good and hard and I lose every patient on my round. That happens. It is statistically inevitable. We get up, and we do it again, and we save someone else. We can’t do that if we’re still carrying the ones we couldn’t get to. Okay? Guilt is a luxury no one can afford in this life, least of all people like you. Don’t buy it.”
Emphasis mine.
Rufus comes back and he’s holding a piece of brown string. When he gives it to me and I realise what it is.
“You took some of her hair?”
“Humans shed hair all the time,” Rufus says. “You got long hair like that, more of it. It catches on doors, plants, on a sweater. Then it goes on the floor. This girl, she brushed her hair outside the apartment. To look smart for class, I guess.”
“And you just pick it up because it’s neater that way.”
“I gather it,” Rufus says, pious and clean. “I keep it all and I colour-grade it, and at the end of the year I sell it on.”
Always something new. I think about how that works and make a mental note not to search Rufus’ place unless I absolutely, positively, have no other fucking leads in the world.
“To who?”
“Embalmers. Mostly for touch-up. Sometimes a corpse will lose hair. If they can’t use it outside, sometimes stuffing.”
“Well,” I say, “life is the process of learning shit that you never ever wanted to hear.”
I laughed out loud.
Final Thoughts
Titanium Noir is, above all other things, fun. It’s lurid and smoky, with memorable, colorful characters and a plot that’s maybe not earth-shattering but interesting and well-crafted. What more can you really ask? I couldn’t wait to pick it back up each day, and that’s pretty high praise.
5 Star/1 Star
Phillip gives 5 stars:
Thank goodness I try not to judge a book by its cover, but even so that GREEN caused me to leave this on my "should I or shouldn't I?" list for far too long. Because it turns out this was just what I needed after a spell of too much non-fiction and too many memoirs.
It is pretty garish, but to be honest it grew on me.
Emma Sexton gives 1 star:
Not my favorite. I was initially a big fan of the dynamics — titans vs normal people in society. But I’m not a fan of noir. And I feel like the author just phoned it in at the end. The dialogue was subpar throughout. Would not recommend.
Emma, if you don’t like noir, maybe don’t read a book with “NOIR” in giant block letters on the cover.
Who Should Read This?
Rating
Titanium Noir is awarded the prestigious 4.5/5 fedoras.
What’s your favorite genre-mashing novel? Should I read/review the sequel of this book? Should I quit my job and become a PI? Drop a comment and let me know!
A good definition of the distinction by Eddie Duggan: “In noir, the primary focus is interior: psychic imbalance leading to self-hatred, aggression, sociopathy, or a compulsion to control those with whom one shares experiences. By contrast, hard boiled paints a backdrop of institutionalized social corruption.” The two are not mutually exclusive.
As much as I love mystery, noir, etc., I often have a hard time following it and almost never figure it out before the reveal. I’ve learned to live with my faults. Accept yourself.
I just love your commentary! Your humor and command of the language is superb. I like film noir, maybe I’ll like this. In the middle of one of your other picks! Write and read on ! 👍🏻