The night before Eugène's funeral, using the pretence of leaving Adèle alone to grieve, the regulars convince Timar to come with them on a late night jaunt to a native village. Shortly thereafter, a black servant, Thomas, is found murdered and Adèle's ailing husband Eugène finally dies of snail fever. After the first night of his stay, Timar awakens to an unexpected sexual encounter with Adèle, the proprietor's wife. Upon arriving, he discovers the job is not available unsure of what to do, he finds temporary residence at a local hotel where he ends up spending his time drinking and playing billiards with a group of hotel regulars: an assortment of loggers and minor government officials. The story concerns Joseph Timar, a sensitive young Frenchman, who travels from La Rochelle to Libreville in Gabon to work at a job his uncle has arranged for him at SACOVA, a logging business.

The novel is divided into thirteen chapters and is written using the third person limited narrative voice. In his introduction to the New York Review Books edition, Norman Rush finds certain parallels between this work and Journey to the End of the Night by Céline.

Coup de lune has much in common with the noir fiction subgenre of hardboiled detective fiction, and could be described as being a 'colonial noir' story, though arguably there are also some existential elements present in the narrative. In a larger context, the novel deals with French attitudes towards Africans and the French colonial experience. It is one of the author's first self-described roman durs or 'hard novels' to distinguish it from his romans populaires or 'popular novels,' which are primarily mysteries that usually feature his famous Inspector Maigret character. Coup de Lune ( Éditions Fayard, 1933), literally 'moonburn' or 'moonstroke' in French, but translated into English as Tropic Moon, is a novel by Belgian writer Georges Simenon.

Tropic Moon by Georges Simenon