I should start by stating that I’m a longtime fan of Christopher Moore.

I was in Hudson News at JFK Airport in 2007 when I stumbled onto A Dirty Job in 2007. I read it in one sitting. I’ve since collected his entire bibliography, and his new releases have become appointment reading for me. I recommend his work to anyone who asks me about my favorite authors, and I frequently shout out his best works. So, when I heard about Noir a couple of months ago, I was excited to read it; when I randomly walked into Barnes & Noble and saw it on the shelf, I bought it immediately.

Noir is a send-up of many tropes of pulp fiction, set in an era when the heroes were hard-boiled, returned soldiers with PTSD and drinking problems; when women were dames and a man’s downfall, and when the good guys and bad guys all had colorful names. The story follows Sammy “Two-Toes” Tiffin, a hard-luck ‘Frisco bartender, whose life is upended when a dame walks into his bar—Stilton, a comely, blonde war widow named after a kind of cheese. The same night, he’s approached by his boss, an unpleasant douchebag named Sal “Sally Gab” Gabelli, with an opportunity for a side hustle. He’s tasked with providing respectable female company to a visiting Air Force General who wants to gain membership in a private club of kingmakers. After some weirdness surrounding a downed weather balloon in Roswell, New Mexico—and Sally Gab’s untimely and accidental death—Sammy finds himself in the crosshairs of a crooked cop and a couple of mysterious agents in black suits and dark glasses, and tries to figure out why, all while trying to get closer to Stilton.

If this plotline sounds a little scattered, welcome to the mind of Christopher Moore. Like most of his other work, Noir is a love story at heart: boy meets girl, boy likes girl, girl likes boy, something insane happens. He has mastered this aspect of storytelling over the years, and it’s on full display in Noir. Both Sammy and Stilton (aka The Cheese) are damaged individuals, and every scene they’re in together is sweet, sad, and compelling at the same time. The world that Moore has crafted for this tale is believable, living, breathing. He populates it with ancillary characters that start out as racial caricatures prevalent in old pulp novels but elevates them with funny and tragic stories of their own, such as Eddie “Moo Shoes” Shu and his one-sided pursuit of exotic dancer Lola Fong. The best of these characters is The Kid, a possibly homeless boy to whom Sammy gives a key to his house and two bits every day to wake him up. The Kid speaks in a mash-up of 1930’s gangster-speak, and made-up or misidentified words. On the other hand, one of the two black characters—Thelonius Jones, a hulking nightclub bouncer with misguided dreams of joining FDR’s Secret Service detail—doesn’t quite sit well with me. He’s portrayed as a sweet and simple man, kind of a bull in a china shop. It’s not unlike another character from another Moore book: Drool, a simpleton jester’s apprentice from Fool and The Serpent of Venice. It made me mildly uncomfortable as a black man, especially given the characterization of black characters in his previous books. To be fair, he is aping a genre and an era that had black characters for comic relief or explicit racial caricature more often than not.

Moore’s stories usually feature some bizarre twist involving a talking animal or an otherworldly entity. He uses both here, and I can’t say it entirely worked for me. It created some slightly disjointed narration at first, and in the final act, made for a convenient (if hilarious) way to turn specific problems to dust.

Minor issues aside, Noir is a book I can comfortably recommend as an introduction to the madness of Moore. While it’s not his best work (that honor goes to Lamb), it’s a solid enough read to get a sense of what kind of author he is without wading through the less interesting early work.

Pros: Funny, engaging, bizarre love story

Cons: Twist didn’t fit

Rating: 3.5 stars

#2018 #bokreview #ChristopherMoore #author #Noir