Noir Fantasy – how Rhonda Roberts fell for the darker side of the city

I first saw Blade Runner in a dirty old theatre in a seedy little back street in Shinjuku.

I’d stumbled into it in a bid to stave off heatstroke and get away from the cloud of pollution that’d swirled just a few feet above my head all day. To my amazement the big screen reflected Tokyo back to me…the Japanese-English, the noodle shops, the smog, the huge blinking neon signs…all filtered through the nostalgic lens of Vangelis’ music score.

I was confused… I still had a headache from the car fumes after all. How could I have not known I was living in a noir paradise? Then I surrendered to the fantasy.

After that I became a fan of noir fiction and film… Black, ebony, midnight, darkness…the shadow always injects the delight into any tale. Show me a trench coat and I’ll follow you down any dark alley. The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep …Joan Crawford in shoulder-pads holding a smoking gun.

Most of all I loved the Bad Women in noir – they’re so abandoned…wild. Beyond the pale.

Then I saw Alien…and best of all Aliens. This was the ultimate dark alley.

I went with a uni friend on a weekday to the old picture theatre in Glebe. Besides us there was only a father and the two young girls he was reluctantly babysitting. Twenty minutes later, when the alien explodes out of the stomach, we were left totally alone in this huge crumbling theatre.

But Ripley was there…finally the fantasy heroine I always wished for. Okay Ripley doesn’t have a trench coat but like all great Noir heroines it’s the shadows that define her.

I see Kannon Dupree as a very Australian noir heroine. Like Ripley her sad past defines her yet she has a love of life that pulls her into the light.

Are you a fan of the same movies as Rhonda? I know the majority of us at Voyager are!

Rhonda Roberts’ first book, Gladiatrix, is now available across Australia and New Zealand. Rhonda lives in the south of Sydney (as you might gather from this post – she certainly knows the area well!) and is working on the next book in the Time Stalker series, Hoodwink.

Visit Rhonda’s website