Redheaded Reviews: Noir by Christopher Moore

Set in 1947 in this spoof on the old noir novels like Dashiell Hammett and James Cain only in the crazy funny way of all Christopher Moore books, Sammy Tiffin a bartender's life changes when he meets a dame named Stilton whom he refers to as the Cheese. The Cheese is a war widow who is a waitress at a five and dime and Sammy who never served in the military yet has a limp that people think he got from the War. His boss Sal wants him to find some fresh-faced girls for this Air Force general friend of his who is trying to join a club and wants to make an impression with the girls who will put out. Sammy figures he will go to Madame Mabel's to pick up some prostitutes, but Sal vetoes this, so Sammy has no idea where to get the girls.

Meanwhile, while eating dinner with his Chinese American friend Eddie Moo Shoes he sees the older men eating a soup made from snake piss that is supposed to be good for male erections. This gives him an idea for a business venture as a friend of his is passing through with some animals some of which are snakes and he agrees to buy one with money he borrows from Eddie and some he had saved up. He had the snake delivered to the bar because it wasn't safe to have it delivered to his apartment. Sal gets curious and opens the crate marked "Dangerous: Snake Inside" and gets bit and dies. Sammy not knowing what to do hides his body in the giant ice chest and tells Eddie about the snake which is now missing.

Sal had gotten the Cheese and her co-worker Myrtle to agree to go the party for the weekend for $100 each along with some of Mabel's cleanest girls. He also made plans with Mabel to have a girl take pictures of what goes on there at the secret meeting so that they can blackmail the members later. When the Cheese and Myrtle go missing, Sammy begins a hunt for them that leads him to some interesting places. A pair of men in black is hunting him down as well as the two dames.

This book contains a cast of interesting characters. Eddie Moos Shoes is led around by the nose by Lois Fong a performer at the Shanghai Club where they both work. Milo Andreas who is too disturbed by the war to drive his cab, so instead he sells shots to people coming out of Cookie's Cafe at night to put in their coffee. Lone Jones is a large African American who believes that Roosevelt is still alive and that he will one day go and work in his Secret Service. Lone Jones helps Sammy by punching out a troublesome, crooked, mean cop. But, of course, this only causes more problems and Eddie and Sammy takes him to Eddie's outcast (for being a "cat fucker"), Uncle Ho, to be doped up until they can figure out what to do with him which needs to be fast because they can't afford Uncle Ho's prices.

The writing is a delight and takes the noir language and plays with it like a kid with a new toy such as "the fog off the bay was steaming between the buildings like a scarf through a stripper's leg, leaving everything damp and smelling of sailors' broken dreams". Moore has once again outdone himself and written a book that takes the noir genre and puts it on its head in such a zany and utterly creative and unique fashion. This a fabulous book and I cannot recommend it enough.

Quotes

The fog lay spread across the city like a drowned whore—damp, cold, smelling of salt and diesel—a sea-sodden street walker who’d just bonked a tugboat…

-Christopher Moore (Noir p 17)

“And I’d curse in French when I got stuck behind a cable car.”

“In French?” said Stilton.

“Yeah. Cursing in French is classier. It ain’t even like cursing. More like poetry.”

-Christopher Moore (Noir p 54)

And they were off again. Oh yes, there were trains and tunnels, rockets blasting off, torpedoes clearing their tubes, pistons and cylinders, oil rigs pumping, bridges collapsing, stars exploding, galaxies expanding, and a squeaky part that sounded like angry mice. He was Romeo and she was Juliet, he was Heathcliff and she was Cathy, he was Tristan and she was Isolde, he was Ahab and she was Moby-Dick, she was the Titanic and he was the Iceberg, and they liked that so much that he was the Iceberg for a while and she was the Titanic. She was Snow White and he was the Seven Dwarfs, he was the Scarecrow and she was the Flying Monkeys—it was a epic and divine disaster they acted out in that crawl-space apartment, taking breaks to breathe, and drink gin and smoke, and they even dozed off together toward dawn.

-Christopher Moore (Noir p 74)

“Sal knows a general?”

“Air force. Not a real general.”