I’m a fan of audiobooks, since I tend to do a lot of driving for work of one kind or another. So I got the audiobook version of Christopher Moore’s Noir. The reader, Johnny Heller, takes to the idea of a Noir novel with some gusto. He swings wildly from Edward G Robinson to JFK to FDR and once or twice meanders into Droopy the Dog and other cartoonish voices. For me, at least, a little of this goes a long way. I found myself lost more than once amid the voices that sounded a little too much alike a little too much of the time. But that is a minor gripe, overall, I greatly enjoyed Noir.
It’s the story of an average Joe that slings booze in a gin joint in San Francisco, where he meets a dame named after a cheese and gets mixed up in murder and mayhem. A brilliant time is had by all.
Set in 1947, there is a lot of talk about The War and a certain flying saucer that crashed in New Mexico. The bulk of the story is about our hero, Sammy the bartender, and his girl Stilton, named after the English cheese. A dozen or so minor characters fill out the story in wonderful and oddball ways. Crooked cops, mobsters, whores, Men in Black, and the Rich and Powerful White Men who secretly control the world from a campsite north of San Fransisco. Two surprise characters that show up near the end of the book are fun.
Moore is a fun writer and Noir is a fun read. He does get a little carried away with the slang of the time. A sentence doesn’t go by without someone getting the hairy eyeball or reminding us that the kid who lives in Sammy’s apartment building is a rotten little kid. No one gets killed, they all get croaked. And so on and so forth, everything is dipped in a thick sauce of 1940s slang. As I said, a little of this goes a long way.
Noir tells a pretty simple story, at least for Christopher Moore. There are no history changing demons, no blood thirsty vampires, no death dealers bringing about the end of the world. It was fun. I liked all the characters and the story zipped along at a good pace. Noir was well worth reading, or listening to.
