I like to write about real people and real places that weave seamlessly into the fictional worlds I build. One of my favorites is Moore’s Restaurant, the Prohibition‑era dive that appears throughout Whiskey Covenant. Today the building is known as The Slippery Noodle Inn, but its history stretches back far beyond its blues‑bar reputation.
The structure began life as the Tremont House during the Civil War, and local lore insists it served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. The name Tremont House is still visible on the brick if you stand across South Meridian Street and look up.
By the late 19th century it had become the Concordia House, a German‑American social club that fell out of favor during World War I when anti‑German sentiment swept Indianapolis. After that, the building shifted identities again, eventually becoming Moore’s Restaurant — though “restaurant” was generous even by Prohibition standards.
During the 1920s and early 1930s, Moore’s had a reputation as the hangout for every underground heister in Indianapolis. The steak was supposedly decent, but the real draw was the booze, the gambling, the women, and the secrets. Stills bubbled in the basement. Politicians and cops drifted through the doors when they needed something done quietly. It was a place where the city’s filth pooled, and everyone knew it. For Mick Daugherty, it’s the perfect place to drop an ear to the ground:
Moore’s wasn’t just a bar. It was the gutter where the city’s filth pooled—bootleggers, gamblers, pimps, union bosses, the kind of men who made things happen, legal or not. Politicians slunk through its doors like rats sniffing for opportunity. It was Mick’s backyard.
Mick found his best fighters here. The ones who could take a beating and give it back twice as hard. If they had the right instincts, they moved up—enforcers, men who knew when to break bones and when to break spirits. Mick had been recruited here at seventeen after a drunken brawl in which he had faced off a brute twice his size. Hinkey Dink, one of the brashest, most colorful patrons of Moore’s, had picked him up off the floor and declared him just the material he needed in his prizefighting ring. Now Mick stepped into Moore’s, the dark interior exuding filth and vice, smelling of spilled whiskey and tobacco. The cops never raided this place. They knew better. It billed itself as a restaurant and indeed you could get a half decent steak, but what men really came here for was the booze and the secrets. He paused in the doorway, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dim lighting that gleamed off the pressed tin ceilings. About the only thing that gleamed in this place. The floor was cracked and warped. The brick walls were dingy. Everything had a veneer of tobacco smoke.
Moore’s was notorious for attracting corrupt law enforcement, especially during the Duvall administration. And corrupt law enforcement in Mick’s pocket is an advantage he can’t afford to ignore. And Moore’s is just as lucrative for Mick in Devil’s Track as it is in Whiskey Covenant:
Mick hadn’t anticipated seeing the cop in here, but so much the better. Any scuttlebutt was better than no scuttlebutt. “Well, if it ain’t the only bleedin’ cop in Indy who charges a fee to not solve a murder.”
Fogarty looked around in the dim confines of Moore’s, till he saw Mick. He strode over to Mick’s table, throwing his Fedora on it and pulling up a chair and sat down. Well, if it ain’t the walking tax write-off who thinks ‘subtle’ is a word you boil in an Irish stew.
Mick flicked ash off the cigarette. ”You hoping to warn me or bury me, Fogarty? I forget which way your compass spins these days.”
“I gotta ask,” Fogarty said, squinting at him. “How the hell does the Slovene over at the Westside owe you anything?”
And Moore’s had a reputation for being a bit of a brothel as well as a purveyor of illicit booze and scuttlebutt.
He heard Lilly come downstairs, her silk kimono trailing like a whisper behind her on the stairs. She straddled his lap, silk slipping off one shoulder, scent of rosewater brushing his throat, as she leaned in and breathed deep. “That’s not my perfume,” she said. “No,” he admitted. “It’s isn’t. But it stayed on my coat. She didn’t”
She didn’t pull away. Didn’t accuse. Just rested her cheek against his collarbone, her fingers curled loosely in the open neck of his shirt.
“Do I have to ask?”
He let out a breath, warm against her hair. “No.”
“Do I need to worry?” He lifts her chin, eyes meeting hers without deflection.
“Not unless I stop coming home.” A long moment. Then she pressed her lips to the corner of his mouth. Not a kiss. A claim. And one he let her take.
“You go to Moore’s for what you need… and come home for what you want.”
“I go for the talk, not the tumble,” he told her shortly.
“Maybe not, but those girls would walk over broken glass to sink their claws into you. We both know it.”
Moore’s was one of those places that was as gritty as it was colorful. Today the Slippery Noodle Inn is known as Indiana’s oldest continuously operating bar and one of the state’s most iconic blues venues. Even if you’ve never stepped inside, you know the name. It’s part of the city’s cultural vocabulary, the kind of place people speak of with a mix of nostalgia and pride. The ghosts of Moore’s are long gone, but the bones of the place still hum with history