Dissident Books © 2009 (orig. pub. 1935), 256 pages

Don’t Call Me a Crook is probably one of the stranger books I’ve ever read. The memoir was originally published in 1935 by Bob Moore, whose genuine name was Robert Macmillan Allison. The author was a Glaswegian and an engineer who wound up traveling acircular the world while working on various ships. He was also an incorrigible rogue–a burglar (despite the book’s title and the author’s protestations), a drunk, a racist. He stole from people who trusted him. He abandoned his wife and child. (At least, he apparently never gave them a second thought after sending them back to Glasgow when family life became burdensome.) One is tempted, given Moore’s immorality throughout the book, to call him a sociopath, but I don’t know if that’s right: he does show signs of humanity at times in the book.

The stories Moore has to tell are often fascinating. Here he is, trying to save a woman who’s jumped off a yacht, or he’s shooting at Chinese pirates, or he’s stealing a bag of diamonds or setting a ship on fire or lying to a man about his wife after he’s stolen a wad of the couple’s cash:

“But I was not to be diverted by such uncouth tactics, so I just said, ‘Yes, I think you should, because it is all wrong to say I was seen kissing your wife, Mr. Flight. I was seen doing no such thing. I would not dream of being seen kissing your wife, Mr. Flight.’ (And neither I would for that matter, for where is the sense in being seen?) But he thought I meant I had not been kissing her at all so he said, ‘Well, I’m sorry Bobby.’ And I said, ‘Aw, that’s all right,’ so we parted quite good friends.

“But I did not go back to their house anymore after that because Mrs. Flight and I went away until all her money was spent.

“But she did not know that it was

her money we were spending, or she would have been mad at me, but I told her I had been lucky and won some money at the dogs.

“She thought I was taking her for a holiday on my money, and that will show you what a funny woman she was. For why should I have taken her for a holiday with my money, when she was not really young anymore and she had a house where I could go without spending any money at all?”

Moore’s life was anything but dull. This, combined with the conversational tone of the book–if Moore wrote this himself, then he was a natural storyteller–make for a winning combination. The book is also interesting as a historical document. In it we see the Prohibition era from a drunk’s eye view. It was a lawless, violent, very alien world that Moore inhabited.

For a while, then, the book is good fun. Sure, Moore is a scoundrel. It’s clear from the start that he can’t be trusted. But we’re willing to forgive him some of his offensees because he has a certain charm. For all his adventures and crimes the book even becomes tedious about halfway through…until we’re woken up again. On page 202 Moore does something terrible. And he mentions it almost in passing, as if it were nothing at all. It is so shocking that I had to reread the paragraph to  make sure I’d understood him correctly. What he did thoroughly undermines any positive thoughts we might have had about the man. It’s a strange thing, 200-odd pages into a memoir, to find out something like this about the narrator, to have our feelings for the character upended.

So in the end this was a uniquely disturbing book, unique as I’ve never experienced anything quite like this–the shocking revelation from a narrator I thought I understood, his deadpan delivery, his apparent indifference. A very strange book, but worth reading.