Reading seanan_mcguire's most excellent novel "Rosemary and Rue," I've come to the conclusion that the hardest kind of novel-writing has to be noir.

Not that all novels aren't difficult in their own way, of course - but watching what Seanan is doing is amazing, because she's setting up at least fifteen different characters, each with their own motivation, each charging in and out at will, and I can keep track of them. Bad noir is often about a maze of twisty little personages, all alike. Seanan, however, manages to distill the essence of each personality so that they fit, comfortably, into an introductory page or two.

That requires a powerful grasp of character; it's easy to write someone you'll remember clearly for the rest of the novel if you take up, say, a hundred pages explaining who this woman is and why she's here. Doing that in a page and a half? Near impossible. And doing it time and time again? That's the Olympic gold.

Yet noir (and most mystery) novels are, by their nature, about a lot of people doing things. Noir's all about distillation; you don't have a lot of time to go into why this ancient mansion is creepy, so you have to nail it in a paragraph. You don't have a lot of space for background details, so get it quick.

The goodness of Rosemary and Rue - which I have not finished yet, so shut yer yaps - is that Seanan manages to nail that Gaimanesque trick of finding the one right detail that, fractally, tells you everything else you need to know. She's compact, which allows her to pack a lot of stuff into her writing, making every page pop with something both interesting and relevant.

I'm not a fan of pulpish urban fantasy - Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris leave me cold - but I have to admit there's a talent in there that I do not, as yet, possess. And it's a damn fine thing to see happen when it clicks, because you have to get everything right so quickly and so succinctly that it's like ice skating on a birdbath. Watching it unfold as I read is a pleasure as a writer and a pleasure as a reader.