So welcome to A Gallery of Rogues. This is (hopefully) going to be a semi-regular blog I'm going to do about all things Noir, whether it's Crime, Pulp, Neo, Country or my new favourite Neon Noir! I'll be doing reviews and retrospectives on all manner of media like books, films, games and comics and I'll sometimes I'll just be talking about a topic that interests me. Really I decided to start making this blog since I can't find any decent fan sites and I've nobody else to talk to about it :- /. Anyway my first topic will be about the Femme Fatale.

WARNING: For maximum effect read this blog while listening to L.A. Noire Official soundtrack and with Rainy Mood on in the background at the same time.

She's the woman that walks in the door like a tigress in a Burmese orphanage- strawberry blond and legs four hours. Every mook in the room is looking in her direction but she's only got eyes for you. She sashays her way over leaving broken men in her wake. You get a whiff of her perfume. It smells like sex. She has bad news written all over her like October '29. You know you're not her first but you're fool enough to think you'll be her last.

The Femme Fatale is one of the oldest archetypal characters used in fiction. Female characters that use seduction and sex as weapons to manipulate people and get what they want have been used in ancient myths of every culture and is still used today. This type of character has been used extensively in Noir fiction and is now thought of as a staple in the genre.

These days this character type has been getting a bad rap. Some people see the Fatale as misogynistic and sexist relic to a bygone age when women were seen as sex objects and nothing more. For instance when DC rebooted with the New 52 one of the titles in the first waves Catwoman and everybody was happy about that. Catwoman is a great character and over the years has become one of the most popular female comic book characters. And she is also the epitome of the Femme Fatale. A dangerous girl that knows what she wants and will use anything at her disposal to get it. But when she was shown in the first issue of her New 52 series seducing Batman and having sex with him on the rooftops (a very femme fatale thing to do) fans were up in arms saying that she was over sexualised.

Another comic example I can think of is Natasha Romanova. Espionage has a huge overlap with Noir almost to the point that it's become the British version of the genre. In the spy game there was agents known as Honey Traps. Basically woman that use their feminine wiles to manipulate the male agents into spilling all the secrets. And this is what Natasha used to be. The name Black Widow is a reference to the spider that would bed her mate then kill it. However like other characters this trate is almost gone from the character as she is now shown to be more the straight up secret agent type.

The talk of the Femme Fatale being sexist got me thinking about how to use it in a different manner. Do you think a role reversal would work? A hardnose female reporter being seduced and manipulated by a male. A Homme Fatale if you will? Or would that still be seen as sexist to the woman? I'm not really sure.

Part of the fun of Noir is that their isn't really any good guys. Everybody has some dirt on them. All the men are drunk and brutal thugs so I kind of enjoy having the females be sexy and manipulative. I do agree that sexism was rife in 50s, 60s and even some current crime fiction but I don't agree that the Femme Fatale was apart of that. In fact I see the character type as kind of opposite. She isn't going to take your crap but she'll take your money and your dignity and she's always the smartest one in the room usually with everybody else wrapped around her finger.

This was my first A Gallery of Rogues blog so hopefully you enjoyed it and I'll be doing more soon. Please leave comments in the mean time :)