Title: Don’t Call Me a Crook!
Author: Bob Moore
Cover Artist: Ruth Esehak-Gillespie
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Dissident Books
Publication Date: May 1, 2009
Seems lately the Nerd has been ears-deep in degeneracy. No, I haven’t been smoking crack before hitting up the massage parlor (I save the crack-smoking for after my appointment, thank you very much), I’ve merely been enjoying lots of misanthropic media. I plowed through the Eastbound and Down series on DVD which – along with The Foot Fist Way and Observe and Report – establishes the reputations of Jody Hill, Ben Best and Danny McBride as the most gleefully anti-social filmmakers working today. Then I polluted my mind with disgusting smut in short story form with the help of the wonderful short story collection Uncage Me from Bleak House Books, edited by Jen Jordan. Then, just when you think the Nerd would be out knifing hoboes or spitting on the elderly, I pick up a piece of lost vintage true bastardry by Bob Moore called Don’t Call Me a Crook! I tell you, dear reader, it was the perfect opium-infused cherry on top of my self-constructed degenerate chocolate cake.
Bob Moore’s Don’t Call Me a Crook! was for all intents and purposes straight-up fucking lost for nigh on seventy-five years before this beautiful reprinting by Nicholas Towasser of Dissident Books. Bob was a ship engineer who lived the life of a rogue (at the very least) from WWI to the Great Depression. The game Scotsman traveled all over the world, causing and falling into trouble wherever he went. From up the treacherous far reaches of the Yangtze River down to the gorgeous streets of Buenos Aires, Moore lived as exciting (and debauched) a life as I’ve ever read. Luckily, he also has an appropriately conversational and wryly funny writing voice with which to tell the twisted tale.
Okay, sure. Let me field your first nagging question, dear reader. You’re thinking, What’s the deal, Nerd? Not only are you reviewing some true crime shit, it’s fucking old true crime shit, like no-fucking-cuss-words old true crime-shit. Well, ever-skeptical-of-the-Nerd’s-impeccable-taste reader, let me assuage (mighty big word for a literary philistine, ain’t it?) your childish fears.
Don’t Call Me a Crook! may be old as hell and swear-free, but noir it sure-as-fuck is. Moore is a charming “you want to be him” rogue at best and a completely immoral bastard at worst (seriously, you won’t believe some of the shit this guy cops to in this memoir). And what makes the truly dark shit he does in this book even…noir-ier (totally a real term, don’t worry about it), is that the guy relates it all with a wink and a smile. The guy is hardly ever remorseful, chalking up many of his more appalling crimes to “teaching folks a lesson.” He’s a sociopath, but like that asshole in your local who you can’t seem to tear yourself away from, he’s a damned entertaining asshole.
And that’s what makes all the many adventures Moore has in Don’t Call Me a fucking breeze to read: his delight in relating even the most sordid and terrible of his actions to reader. And even though certain episodes turn extremely ugly and Moore is often (in keeping with the times, naturally) horrendously racist, you can’t help but find him charming and, to some extent, he leaves you wishing that you yourself could have lived a similarly exciting life in Moore’s extremely exciting times.
So pick up a copy of Don’t Call Me a Crook! A Scotsman’s Tale of World Travel, Whisky and Crime and hang out with a degenerate for the ages. True and old or not, you won’t regret that shit, guaran-fucking-teed. Just don’t blame the Nerd when you fail to resist that sudden urge to try your hand at gunrunning and opium-smuggling…
