9780062803115
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Noir audiobook

  • By: Christopher Moore
  • Narrator: Johnny Heller
  • Category: Fiction, Humorous
  • Length: 9 hours 3 minutes
  • Publisher: HarperAudio
  • Publish date: April 17, 2018
  • Language: English
  • (11201 ratings)
(11201 ratings)
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Noir Audiobook Summary

The absurdly outrageous, sarcastically satiric, and always entertaining New York Times bestselling author Christopher Moore returns in finest madcap form with this zany noir set on the mean streets of post-World War II San Francisco, and featuring a diverse cast of characters, including a hapless bartender; his Chinese sidekick; a doll with sharp angles and dangerous curves; a tight-lipped Air Force general; a wisecracking waif; Petey, a black mamba; and many more.

San Francisco. Summer, 1947. A dame walks into a saloon . . .

It’s not every afternoon that an enigmatic, comely blonde named Stilton (like the cheese) walks into the scruffy gin joint where Sammy “Two Toes” Tiffin tends bar. It’s love at first sight, but before Sammy can make his move, an Air Force general named Remy arrives with some urgent business. ‘Cause when you need something done, Sammy is the guy to go to; he’s got the connections on the street.

Meanwhile, a suspicious flying object has been spotted up the Pacific coast in Washington State near Mount Rainer, followed by a mysterious plane crash in a distant patch of desert in New Mexico that goes by the name Roswell. But the real weirdness is happening on the streets of the City by the Bay.

When one of Sammy’s schemes goes south and the Cheese mysteriously vanishes, Sammy is forced to contend with his own dark secrets–and more than a few strange goings on–if he wants to find his girl.

Think Raymond Chandler meets Damon Runyon with more than a dash of Bugs Bunny and the Looney Tunes All Stars. It’s all very, very Noir. It’s all very, very Christopher Moore.

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Noir Audiobook Narrator

Johnny Heller is the narrator of Noir audiobook that was written by Christopher Moore

Christopher Moore is the author of seventeen previous novels, including Shakespeare for SquirrelsNoirSecondhand Souls, Sacre Bleu, Fool, and Lamb. He lives in San Francisco, California.

About the Author(s) of Noir

Christopher Moore is the author of Noir

Noir Full Details

Narrator Johnny Heller
Length 9 hours 3 minutes
Author Christopher Moore
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date April 17, 2018
ISBN 9780062803115

Subjects

The publisher of the Noir is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Fiction, Humorous

Additional info

The publisher of the Noir is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062803115.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Matthew

May 28, 2018

This book is an awesomely unique and entertaining ride. I was enthralled every second and frequently found myself laughing out loud. Vocalizing while reading is almost always a good thing!Moore really captures the feel of old hard boiled stories and film noir. And, while he is often over the top and exaggerating some of the noir tropes for humorous effect, it does not feel silly. Instead it feels witty, creative, controversial, and more. Moore definitely has a feel to his characters, and that is not a bad thing. As all the characters were introduced and went through their development, I kept being reminded of the characters from A Dirty Job and Secondhand Souls. But, again, Moore does such a great job with his characters, I don't mind!If you are a fan of Moore's other work, hard boiled mystery, comic relief, and/or your characters talking like they are hanging out in a speakeasy, you must check this book out!

Robert

October 19, 2017

I’ll start by saying I enjoyed this book from beginning to end. That being said, the first half didn’t have the feel of a Christopher Moore novel. Fans will know what I mean. It was good, but not Lamb, good. Now halfway through something happens. Something delicious and crazy and perfectly Squirrel People. And from that point on, it is most definitely a Christopher Moore book. The man has yet to fail me. And Lamb still holds top spot for best book of all time.

Calista

May 08, 2020

This is Christopher Moore's homage to Film Noir set in the 50s after WWII. All the zany characters we expect from a Moore Novel and here: we have the Drag King club and lesbians, the femme fatale, some crazy Asian, there is a black mamba snake who has a part in this story and of course there is the bartender and the detective. Also, there is the Moon-man and Area 51 is involved and Men in Black.I think one of the most interesting things in the books was the last few pages where he talks about his research into all the wacky things and most of them he found in the history books in some way. The Drag club was famous.It took me much longer to get into this story than it usually does, but I did enjoy the story. It became more funny. It's a different type of book for Chris than his usual. I felt like the first part was more serious and less funny and the book picked up steam as it went on.There is plenty of offensive language from our past. He doesn't change it to fit todays politically correct language. The Chinese characters sound like 50s movies and all sorts of other things. I think this is a fine novel and if you can give it time, it's a good funny romp.

Suzzie

May 09, 2018

This book is so funny. I read it within hours. It’s so ridiculous a lot of the times but in the good, entertaining kind of ridiculous (Mrs.Jones comment about her late husband’s manhood🤣). I have not read anything else by Christopher Moore and honestly knew very little about his writing going into the book, but I really liked this book. I actually wasn’t the one who picked this book to read, my little cousin showed me it at Barnes & Noble and I ended up putting it on hold on my library’s digital app. I am so glad I did. My quick and simple: funny book with some of the most amusing characters!

Josh

May 08, 2018

Noir is a satire / humorous take of the more serious noir genre with a twist. In it, the reader is taken down a dark alley laughing all the way as our faithful protagonist Sammy ‘Two Toes’ Tiffin goes from bartender with puppy love to entrepreneur to crime fighting extraordinaire.From sketchy business ideas involving snake urine, to dog pizza (pizza made for dogs, not dogs as an ingredient), author Christopher Moore light-heartily jumps to plot elements encompassing rich fat cats out for a good time while in the process kidnapping a few dames in distress, only to then leap towards an alien angle with a misunderstood moon-man. All this action taking place around the omnipresent ‘Cheese’, a to-die-for blonde named Stilton who happens to be the object of Sammy’s eye. My rating: 4/5 stars. I couldn’t wipe the goofy smile off my face while listening to this audiobook.

Art

January 08, 2018

Here's the Rorschach test whether you will like this book. Chris Moore begins one of the chapters of Noir thusly: "The fog lay spread across the city like a drowned whore -- damp, cold, smelling of salt and diesel -- a sea-sodden streetwalker who'd just bonked a tugboat..." If you are offended by the quote, then never mind reading the book. On the other hand, if you see the playful tweaking of the noir genre then by all means continue on.With its fog and alley ways, San Francisco is the perfect place for a noir novel, even if this one has more aspects of "playful noir" than the real thing that Dashiell Hammett might write. The Maltese Falcon, after all, was also set in San Francisco. Moore takes us to San Francisco in 1947, just a few years after the Maltese Falcon movie, and the same year It's A Wonderful Life came out.You get all of the standard noir features -- semi-innocent guys caught up in weird plots, dames, gats, murders, sketchy bars, waterfronts, all presented faithfully to the time and place, not reinterpreted for the political sensibilities of 2018.. You also get the Chris Moore touches -- oddball customs, sentient animals, strange beings. Sometimes they mix well. Sometimes they feel sort of thrown willy-nilly into the mix. It's still a fun trip, so come on in, the fog is fine.

Nicole D.

February 05, 2018

This isn't a totally trademark Christopher Moore book, but you know what? I'm totally OK with that. People evolve and frankly I didn't want to read a formulaic novel. I struggled a bit at first - I think Moore was working on creating the Noir feel and it just felt like a lot of words going nowhere. But I'm a fan and I knew that it couldn't be that far off the mark, so I needed to persevere. What came next was maybe a little sophisticated that we perhaps expect. San Francisco 1947. Your ragtag bunch of misfits get caught up in something which would be too much to handle for most. Using their street smarts they slither from one trouble to the next yet manage to overcome. The characters are great (typically Moore) and at the center of story is the relationship between Two Toes and the Cheese, which I absolutely loved. I don't know what it was about those two together, but for me it was magic.The only disappointment for me was the lack of laugh out loud moments. It's humorous but definitely more subdued. San Francisco is often featured prominently in Moore novels, and this (for me) was a new and fresh look at the City. In the afterword he gives us a glimpse into the process of writing this book and into the people and places who influenced him. I loved that. It made the reading of the book more special. I enjoyed it.

Albert

April 29, 2018

Who am I kidding, right? If Christopher Moore pooped on a page every day and called it his Rorschach novel, I'd buy it and probably find something interesting in the way his feces splattered in the most hysterical and poignant patterns ever conceived. So, yeah. I guess you could say I'm a fan.But here's the thing: Being a Christopher Moore fan isn't easy. He doesn't write on an annual schedule like a lot of my other favorites. And let's face it--the collected works, to date, set a very, very high bar. I have very high expectations of his books. That said, Noir was spectacular. It wasn't what I was expecting at all. I somehow had it in my mind that this was going to be a detective novel, but it wasn't. It was just a collaboration of misfits fighting back against the absurdity of what faces them. In that way, it was similar to his earlier Pine Cove books.The characters make this book. And he creates some fun ones for us. Moore's "dame" is hardly distressed. She follows along in a great history of him writing strong female characters. The everyman is fantastically flawed but good at heart and always trying to do the right thing. His cast of friends is superb and inclusive and full of laughs in a time period where that's difficult to do.The banter is also top notch. I found myself stopping every few minutes to highlight a new passage I wanted to come back to and laugh at again later. No one spins a phrase like Moore does. This book is filled with some absolute gems."...he smiled like a dog at a barbecue for the blind.""Free my people!" "I will. I am the Harriet Tubman of your breasts.""Chinatown is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a wonton, and fried."and my favorite..."She had the kind of legs that kept her butt from resting on her shoes--"How can you go wrong with good stuff like that? Huh?I can be impartial though. I can be fair. I can point out some things that could be different or better. And mostly, it's just this. I wish I could whisper in Moore's ear that it was okay to be silly. That it's okay to be absurd. I get the feeling he's grown up quite a bit over the past decade. And that's okay. It also seems like he wants to play in deeper waters. It's easy to see he's challenging himself. All good things. But many years ago, you let your freak flag fly with a book about a demon and followed up, over the years by a sea serpent attracted to depressed people, zombies, vampires and a primordial goo that created life. He wrote about these thing unabashedly and full of joy. It's cool that he wants to try different things and even perhaps more serious topics, but remember, Vonnegut himself wrote the best anti-war book ever written using a character who had become unstuck in time. I guess I'd just want him to know that he can be smart and funny and absolutely over the wall absurd at the same time. In this day and age, Mr. Moore, we need something absolutely beyond the realm of silly just to compete with the news that depresses us every night. Anyway, that's my two cents. Read this book, read it right now, read it before even finishing this review. Seriously, why are you still reading this? Moore is a genius and the only true complaint I have is having to wait for the next book.

Sue

October 17, 2018

Think Monty Python meets Chinatown…… or Monty Python recruits the Three Stooges and does a rough take on Casablanca. Either way this book is hilarious. Anytime I snort out loud because of a book on my commute, it’s worth a five star rating. Believe me when I tell you - it’s probably only happened a handful of times! This wee tome has every dime store phrase that you can think of – and then some. Plus enough humor to equal any mad trap movie you can think of. Fast paced and with more plot twists and turns than you can shake a stick at, it’s a tongue-in-cheek novel of the noir genre and you won’t be disappointed!

Chris

August 24, 2022

This was a very fun read. Moore does a fantastic job of creating the atmosphere and the cadence similar to the works of Chandler and Hammett. The setting of San Francisco in 1947 was well researched and Moore makes you feel that you're walking the streets of the city right beside characters Sammy, Eddie, and "The Cheese." Speaking of these characters, you really get to know them and their backstories and how they develop over time. As for the plot, overall, I enjoyed the story and seeing it develop, buy I do think that the POV of the snake was unnecessary, and I feel that it didn't really add anything to the book. If you enjoy hard boiled fiction with an over the top plot, and some belly laughs, then this is one you should check out.

Steve

July 11, 2018

Moore provides a lighter piece of what he calls "perky noir" (less emphasis upon the darker elements of noir, but still has all the crooks, corrupt cops, and desirable broads that you'd expect in a period piece from the post-WWII America). Moore adds his crisp wordplay, and fantasy/scifi and comic touches. You'll be delighted by Sammy, Stilton, and the rest of the denizens of 1947 San Francisco. And stick around for the Afterward so Moore can teach you mooks some history.

Alan

October 28, 2018

Break out your best bad Bogie impression for this one, boys... Christopher Moore is at it again.There are times in a guy's life when he finds himself floating facedown in a sea of troubles, and as hope bubbles away, he thinks, How the hell did I get here?—p.3Noir is set in 1947. World War II is finally over, and Sammy Two-Toes is tending bar at Sal Gabelli's place in San Francisco, safe and sound, except for a limp he doesn't like to talk about and an unfortunate situation with his boss, when... a dame walks into the bar. She's tall and blonde and beautiful, of course, dressed (mostly) in a bright red dress (like the one on that cover)—but there's more to her than that. She's adept at banter, quick-witted and sarcastic, which is key. She and Sammy aren't more than two sentences into their first conversation before it's plain that they're meant for each other. Her name... is Stilton.Yeah, like the cheese.Despite all the snappy back-and-forth, though, Noir is not really that full of one-liners and belly laughs. My first real laugh-out-loud moment was this exchange between Sammy and his buddy Eddie from Chinatown:"Fine," said Eddie. "But as the Buddha says, 'A man who has not tasted five-spice aardvark has never tasted joy.'""Uh-huh," I said. "The Buddha says that, huh?""Far as you know."—p.11Before the end of Noir, Sammy and Stilton will have encountered men in black, women in black tie and tails, black men in black tuxedos, black-and-whites with a cherry on top, and a whole host of more colorful characters. Now, I'm not sure, but I think this is the first book for which Moore has felt it necessary to include a specific disclaimer; his "Author's Note" says,This story is set in 1947 America. The language and attitudes of the narrators and characters regarding race, culture and gender are contemporary to that time and may be disturbing to some. Characters and events are fictional.And boy, howdy, ain't that the truth. Phrases like "persons of the ornamental persuasion" are the least of it. For example, Noir has exactly one black narrator, and (view spoiler)[he's a snake—literally; Petey is a rather bitey black mamba from South Africa, who picks up the slack in a couple of chapters when Sammy's perspective isn't quite enough. (hide spoiler)].So yeah, Noir comes very much from the white, male, cisgendered viewpoint you'd kind of expect from its stated genre, breaking no new ground at all from that perspective. But... Moore is at least aware of this, and subverts it well enough, I think, within the contexts of time and place. The more racist and sexist a character is, for example, the more likely he (or she, but mostly he) is to be a bad guy in other ways as well. Kinda like real life, that way.Besides, Noir isn't really noir, you know—not exactly. It's comedy, which is something Christopher Moore does very, very well.Despite our street-savvy appearance, it turns out that Eddie Moo Shoes and I are less than first-rate when it comes to perpetrating crimes.—p.93But they, and their companions in Noir, are first-rate at keeping us entertained...

John

May 09, 2018

You know you have a hardboiled novel in your hands when Chapter One starts like this:She had the kind of legs that kept her butt from resting on her shoes -- a size-eight dame in a size-six dress and every mug in the joint was rooting for the two sizes to make a break for it . . .It's 1947 in San Francisco and Sammy "Two Toes" Tiffin is tending bar the night that a gal called Stilton walks in, as described above. She's no floozy, despite appearances, or who cares if she is, because before he really knows what's going on Sammy is three sheets to the wind in love with her. He's also head over heels in the midst of a business opportunity that involves extracting the urine from a deadly mamba (and I do not mean mocking it), plus another that requires him to find a bunch of wholesome lasses who'll go be unwholesome at a weekend gathering of wealthy movers and shakers. And then there's the news of a mysterious crash landing in far-off Roswell, New Mexico . . .Purists may not like it that someone -- presumably the author himself -- had the idea of letting Christopher Moore loose on noir/hardboiled fiction, but personally I loved the results. The convoluted tale is told largely by Sammy himself, in a style that shimmies around among those of various hardboiled writers of yore; I recognized several of the voices without being able to put a name to them, a glorious exception being Damon Runyan, whose voice takes over for a goodly section early in the novel and reappears more briefly several times later.(There's also another narrator, whose identity we don't learn until late in the proceedings. All I can say here is that it's someone you more than somewhat don't want to mess with.)But the novel's a lot more than parody and pastiche. The plot, as you might expect from a piece of noir or neonoir, has more kinks than a Fifty Shades novel, and the characters (some of whom put me in mind of Donald E. Westlake's Dortmunder books) for the most part leap off the page. It's leavened with jokes galore, the vast majority of them very good ones. ("What are you doing in there?" my wife asked as I fell around laughing in the, er, reading room.) My only qualm about the plot was that there are some rather perfunctory moppings-up of bad guys toward the end, as if Moore knew they had to be got rid of but was worried about outstaying his welcome. But I was quite happy to live with that -- and with a couple of painfully strained jokes -- for the sake of all the rest.For me, this isn't quite up there with a couple of Moore's other novels, notably Lamb, but it comes very close indeed. And that's a more than somewhat high standard to achieve.

Nick

May 19, 2018

** spoiler alert ** In this very funny tribute to film noir and post-war San Francisco, Christopher Moore takes us through The City’s bars, nightclubs, brothels, Chinatown, shipyards, and fog-shrouded streets, as well as the redwood gathering spots of some of the world’s most powerful men. It seems that your average guy, Sammy Two-Toes Tiffin, is tending bar in North Beach one night when a comely blonde name Stilton (like the cheese) walks in and the two are instantly magnetized. When she leaves, Sammy is sure that he’ll never see her again, yet she comes back and invites him up to her place, where they spend a fabulous night together. Then she disappears. Sammy has to find her, but he’s got other problems. He’s invested in a venomous black mamba snake whose urine, many Chinese men believe, will make a wonderful aphrodisiac. The snake bites Sammy’s boss, kills him, and then it too disappears. So Sammy’s stuck with a dead body, a missing snake, a missing cheese, and a racist cop who wants protection payments. Sammy knocks the cop unconscious and, with the aid of one of his Chinese buddies, drops the cop at an opium den where, for only a few bucks, the proprietor will keep him on ice for several days. Sammy finally learns that the cheese has gone up to the exclusive Bohemian Grove in the redwoods at the invitation of an air force general seeking membership. The Bohemians aren’t interested in female companionship, so the general produces the body of an alien whose flying saucer just crashed on his base in Roswell New Mexico. Sammy ends up with the cheese, the alien, the near-dead cop, and assorted other San Fran buddies as he flees government agents seeking to recover the alien and eliminate anyone who knows about it. Yes, it’s complicated, but it doesn’t matter. This book is so laugh-out-loud funny that in the end you’ll have a great time and learn to love Sammy, the Cheese, San Francisco, Chinatown, The Bohemian Club and all the rest.

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