Noir
Page 31
My portrayal of the welding crew on which Sammy works is largely drawn from accounts I found on the digital archive at www.foundsf.org, with the dialect drawn from the novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, by Chester Himes, an African American crime writer from the ’40s and ’50s, most famous for his Harlem Detective series. If He Hollers Let Him Go is about an all-black welding crew in a World War II–era shipyard in Los Angeles.
Lone Jones is built of equal parts of reality and fiction. When I was a kid in Ohio I took part in a summer work program for junior high football players, designed to keep us from becoming criminals. It was run by the local police department, and six mornings a week, a cop driving a paddy wagon would pick each of us up at our homes and drive us to a strawberry farm in the country, where we would work a half day in the fields, all day on Saturday. The cop would drop us off after work each afternoon. One morning when I climbed into the back of the paddy wagon, among the twenty or so adolescent boys, mostly from the inner city, was a much bigger, powerfully built, older guy of about twenty. We’ll call him John Henry Johnson. (John Henry was, indeed, his name.) Later, during the drop-off, we discovered that John Henry lived with his mother in a garage, heated by a single woodstove, across from a steel mill. Even guys on the crew from rougher parts of town were shocked and humbled by the poverty.
I worked with John Henry for two summers, and came to know him as one of the strongest, most generous and good-natured people I’ve ever known. He usually rode up in the front of the paddy wagon with the cop, not back in the cage with the rest of us. A slow reader, John Henry would make the driver tailgate other drivers so he could sound out the writing on bumper stickers. Because he had preferred seating in the truck, the other black guys on the crew teased him that he didn’t want to be black; that, in fact, he was white, and only the accident of skin color caused people to misidentify him as black. Soon John Henry owned this and insisted that no, he was not black, and the rest of us backed John Henry up when we were among strangers.
I can hear you cringing. It was fine, it was good, it was friendship, and it was all in good spirits, but seen through a lens of today’s political correctness and horror at cultural appropriation, I suppose it is cringeworthy.
John Henry Johnson was half of the inspiration for Lone Jones. The other half was Hazel in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, a good-natured giant who becomes forlorn when a fortune-teller predicts he will become president of the United States.
Sammy “Two-Toes” Tiffin comes almost entirely from my imagination, except for the improbable accident that sent him west. My own father, several years out of the navy and working at a factory in Toledo, had his left foot nearly severed when a forklift hit him, crushing his foot against a wall. He was already enrolled and scheduled to begin at the highway patrol academy, and before he passed out in the hospital, he made his mother promise that she would not let doctors remove his foot. She prevailed over the physicians, and my father went to the academy (albeit a year late) and became a highway patrolman, a job he loved and did until the end of his life. So that bit of Sammy’s history, and determinism to serve, comes from my father’s story. Mainly Sammy fit the description of what the protagonist of a noir story should be: a regular guy in a sketchy situation. Which brings me to the genre.
Noir
When I first moved to San Francisco, ten years ago, I attended a charity dinner hosted by the public library for authors and readers. The theme of the event was noir. During dinner, one author at my table, an accomplished writer of crime novels himself, said, “Really, I think the best noir author was Jim Thompson.”
“Oh, no, no,” said a nearby author of children’s books, also very accomplished. “Raymond Chandler was definitely the best.”
In a rare exercise of restraint, I kept my mouth shut, because for my money they were both right, and they were both wrong. Scholars and scribes with far more knowledge than me have made careers out of creating, curating, defining, and presenting the noir genre, but I shan’t let that stop me from waxing ignorant. It seems to me that the whole noir genre comes from the term film noir, and that encompasses a whole set of aesthetics that don’t always translate to written fiction. In written fiction, you have your hard-boiled detective guys created by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane. Then you have your dark-streets, desperate noir that usually starts with some poor, hapless working mug who gets roped into some nefarious goings-on by a dame; in that tradition, you have James M. Cain, David Goodis, and Jim Thompson. When I started Noir, I envisioned it would be a work of the second type of noir, a story about the poor working mug, Sammy, and the dangerous dame who tumbles into his life, the Cheese. It was gonna be dark, it was gonna be desperate, there would be fog, and gunplay, and danger. That’s what I thought. I know, I know. What I ended up with is essentially “Perky Noir,” a lot closer to Damon Runyon meets Bugs Bunny than Raymond Chandler meets Jim Thompson . . . but what was I going to do? Noir was already typed at the top of every page.
So, here you go. Thanks for stopping by.
Christopher Moore
San Francisco, California
June 2017
About the Author
CHRISTOPHER MOORE is the author of fifteen previous novels, including Lamb, The Stupidest Angel, A Dirty Job, Fool, Sacré Bleu, The Serpent of Venice, and Secondhand Souls. He lives in San Francisco, California.
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Also by Christopher Moore
Secondhand Souls
The Serpent of Venice
Sacré Bleu
Bite Me
Fool
You Suck
A Dirty Job
The Stupidest Angel
Fluke: or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal
The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove
Island of the Sequined Love Nun
Bloodsucking Fiends
Coyote Blue
Practical Demonkeeping
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
noir. Copyright © 2018 by Christopher Moore. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover illustration and design by Philip Pascuzzo
Cover photographs© Zoonar GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo (woman); © tatcha / Getty Images (dress); © spotwin / Getty Images (bridge)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Moore, Christopher, 1957– author.
Title: Noir : a novel / Christopher Moore.
Description: Hardcover edition. | New York, NY : William Morrow, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017022082| ISBN 9780062433978 (hardcover) | ISBN
9780062433992 (trade pb) | ISBN 9780062791443 (large print) | ISBN
9780062434005 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3563.O594 N65 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022082
Digital Edition APRIL 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-243400-5
ISBN 978-0-06-243397-8 (Hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-06-285815-3 (B&N Edition)
ISBN 978-0-06-285830-6 (B&N Signed Edition)
ISBN 978-0-06-285831-3 (BAM Signed Edition)
ISBN 978-0-06-285832-0 (Ind
igo Signed Edition)
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