China Miéville is guest-blogging over on Amazon's Omnivoracious blog. He's taking the opportunity to propose five new mashup genres for science fiction. Here's one:

iv) Noird

Pronounced Nward: Weird Noir. Candidates for membership are already appearing. Crime novels, particularly of a hard-boiled variety, infused with and riffing off the strange. Detective fiction with a deeply sceptical relationship to the supposedly everyday, whether it eschews morality or not.

Influences will be pretty obvious. Sinewy crime from Dashiel Hammett; Raymond Chandler; Minette Walters; Martin Cruz Smith; Sara Paretsky; Karin Slaughter; Conan Doyle; et innumerable al. Also films, particularly monochrome, extra particularly any featuring trench-coats, hats with shadows, and hands holding smoking revolvers.

The other influence, of course, will be the Weird. It's to be broadly conceived, here, ranging from the explicitly Cthulhoid tentacular through to the slipstream oneiric. Lovecraft through Murakami, Machen via Svankmajerova, Ligotti and C.L. Moore through Louise Bourgeois and Stefan Grabinski. You'll be reading Noird if a flawed hero/ine in fedora; peppers a Deep One with slugs; finds clues that reconfigure themselves after bagging-and-tagging into malevolent trinkets, tchotchkes and odradeks; or realises that the murderer is A Personified Nightmare of Opaque Quotidian Complicity.

What to say: 'All crime fiction is dream fiction really, of course.'

What not to say: 'I prefer cozies.'

The other four genres are over here. I want to blog like China Miéville when I grow up.