The hard boiled hero of the detective story has become pretty much a cliche over the years. Christopher Moore demonstrates how to blow up that cliche in Noir.
Our hero, Sammy, is a sad and lonely loser who works at a seedy bar run by a small time crook in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. The year is 1947, which is significant because a key element of the plot revolves around the mysterious crash of a government plane in Roswell, New Mexico in June 1947.
Sammy's life becomes complicated by the arrival of a crate that his nosy boss opens and the unexpected arrival of an amazing dame named Stilton (after the cheese).
Sammy thinks he's found the One in Stilton, and she reciprocates with equal enthusiasm. When suddenly Stilton vanishes, Sammy's desperate to find her. Aided by an amazing collection of friends and bystanders, Sammy rescues Stilton from a close encounter with prototype Men in Black.
Along the way we get a tour of 1940s San Francisco, from Chinatown to Dark Town, where African Americans, migrating from the South to work in the shipyards during the war, rented the houses left empty when Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps. We catch a glimpse of the female drag clubs of North Beach and the Bohemian Club, that all male bastion of privilege where rich men could indulge in privacy. Moore's recreation of the times and mores is, of course, politically uncorrect by today's standards, but accurate to the time and place of 1940s America. But since many of Sammy's friends are are among those who bear the brunt of discrimination, we are also seeing it from their perspective too.
Moore says in his Afterword that he set our to write "noir" but wound up with "perky noir" instead. Let's just say it's definitively vintage "Moore."
Click HERE to read a review from the Chicago Tribune.
Click HERE to read a review from the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Click HERE to read a review from the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.
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