August 22nd, 2013

    While Otis Moon, the novel, is an homage of sorts for Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett -- a Yank noir --  it is foremost a statement of perseverance for all those dysfunctional mutts out there (with or without access to a dentist) that somehow seem to get the job done no matter how many times they get their teeth kicked in.
The story begins in 1939-San Francisco in the latter stages of America’s massive financial heart attack and subsequent stroke, The Great Depression, and on the bleak cusp of world war. Plagiarizing Dante’s Divine Comedy and Russian Roulette and the Boy Scout Manual our mug Otis Moon lurches into existential being in a shabby office in a gray part of town where the only vegetation is a picture of a cactus on a lost page of the Chronicle as it blows by like tumbleweed… Which Otis Moon follows to Sacramento, Toledo, New York, the North Atlantic, Southampton (UK), Sligo (Ireland), Boston, Fort Bragg (CA), boomeranging to San Francisco’s Tenderloin District.
    Moon is a man of many minds but only one hat, a fedora, a gift from a dead friend. He has lots of dead friends but only the one hat.  The Moon Man’s frayed trench coat and un-shined brogans say more about him than he will, but once he gets that old coat buttoned and those tarnished shoes tied off he’s as tough to stop as a runaway beer wagon on 29th Street (with the same distinct odor). He is just as unpredictable, too, as he careens downwind or in the direction of sure-fire catastrophe armed with an everyman’s grab bag of survival skills.