What makes Bangkok noir different from, say, American, English or Canadian noir? There’s no easy answer. But a stab in the heart of noir darkness suggests that while many Thais embrace the materialistic aspects of modern Western life, the spiritual and sacred side draws upon Thai myth, legends and customs, and remains resistant to the imported mythology structure of the West. In the tension between the show of gold, the Benz, the foreign trips and designer clothes, and the underlying belief system creates an atmosphere that stretches people between opposite poles. I like to think of noir as the by-product of the contradictions and the delusions that condemn people to live without hope of resolving the contradictions. No matter how hard they struggle, they can never break free.
Take a late night walk through some poor neighborhoods in Bangkok. Hear the soi dogs howling as the angry ghosts launch themselves through the night, and and observe that modern possessions don’t stop the owners from making offerings to such spirits. In the slums life is short and cheap, and it’s a tough life filled with uncertainty and doubt. But noir isn’t just about the poor or dispossessed. The rich occupy their expensive condos and drive their luxury cars, sheltering inside the circles of influence and power, only they, too, like the poor, can find their world overturned by an accident of fate, stripping them of their safety and exposing them to terror and loss.
No one is going to provide a definition of “noir” that satisfies everyone. Critics and writers try to distinguish hard-boiled fiction from noir fiction. Strip away the fancy stuff and it comes down to nothing more than this: the difference between hard-boiled and noir is the difference between hemorrhoids and cancer. Hard-boiled stories make for uncomfortable reading, but you know somehow there’s the possibility of hope at the end (no puns are allowed in noir). Noir is black in the way certain death is black. No redemption, no hope, no light at the end of the tunnel.
Tough guys, players, losers, the tormented and lost souls all appear in Bangkok Noir. But the heart of Bangkok Noir is the existential doubts that haunt the characters. Many of them are expatriates washed up like pilot whales on the shore, thinking that someone is going to save them. Instead they get rolled over, sliced up and processed as another part of the food chain. The heat, the corruption, the lies and doublecrosses, the bars and the short-time hotels conspire to lull, entrap, encircle and finish off anyone who betrays the system.
In Bangkok there is an old trail that leads through a thicket of historical noir cases told by Thai storytellers of the past. Books and TV shows have created a mini-industry around the likes of See Ouey, the ChineseThai cannibal executed in the 1950s for murdering half a dozen young children. His preserved body is exhibited like a ghoulish alien creature inside a see-through display case at the Forensic Museum. Another noir celebrity is the ill-fated Jim Thompson, not the noir writer, but the American (rumored to be a CIA agent) who reintroduced silk-making into Thailand and who mysteriously disappeared on a walk in the Malaysian jungle. His body was never found.
This anthology of contemporary stories weaves a pattern of intrigue and mystery where the living and the dead occupy the same space. Crooked lawyers, crooked cops, transsexuals, minor wives, killers and ghosts take you along for a tour that unlocks the secret doors and invites you to enter into the space where Thais and foreigners work, live, play and die together. The only mystery not uncovered by the writers in this collection is why it has taken so long for a volume of Bangkok Noir to appear.
Christopher G. Moore
Bangkok
February, 2011
Gone East
John Burdett
1.
Go East, Young Man.
Anyone with a brain who followed this advice between, say, the end of WWII and the beginning of the 1990’s, is probably a millionaire by now, most will be in the ten million bracket, some are even captains of industry—but who was giving such advice? Answer: my Uncle Walter.
I only met him once when I was fourteen: long hair, sandals, beads, a deep fondness for trees and an extreme gentleness that could seem phony—oh, and a big marijuana habit, too. He took me to the Glastonbury music festival for a week and, by means of mystical argument, did his best to liberate my mind from its suburban prison. My mother had always spoken of her brother in ambiguous terms, sometimes as the black sheep of the family, at others, more wistfully, as the only one who found freedom; she never forgot to mention that he was a polyglot, like all the male members of her family, including me. In his endless travels he picked up languages like shells on a tropical beach. From my point of view it was a momentous meeting: there weren’t very many rebels left by the eighties.
Mum warned me not to be overly influenced by Walter, whose profound hope it was that he would die in the shadow of the Himalayas. The mountains granted his wish somewhat earlier than he had anticipated by means of untreated amoebic dysentery at the age of forty-two. His death left me at a forked path: should I follow the fear-based path of respectability, or take my chances with dharma? Or was there a way of hedging my bets?
I inherited his diary and his advice to go East, which I adapted to my own needs: after all, flower power had long been eclipsed by dough by the time I reached my twenties, and Uncle Walter was already pushing up poppies somewhere in the Hindu Kush. Nor did I expect to stay East; no, his diaries had seduced me, I had to visit those magic places, which he described with a gigantic literary gift he never exploited—then I was going to go West, to make real money.
Yeah, right. In the event I fell in love on my first trip to Bangkok (Thailand was second in Walter’s list of favorite places, after Ladakh). My true love’s family found me a lawyer who got me permanent residence: it was a lot easier in those days. So I married her, learned the language—everyone was astonished at how quickly I picked it up (I had the weirdest feeling that Walter was helping me out with the tones from beyond the grave) and eventually graduated from one of Bangkok’s finest universities with a first class law degree, all financed by my Thai in-laws, who then set me up in a tiny office off Silom and left me in no doubt that it was payback time. They even posted spies: any working hour I spent away from the office, unless on business, was reported to my wife who reported back to me in chiding tones.
And they sent me clients. You need to have practiced law to really have a feel for just how low, dirty, petty, vindictive, fascist, sociopathic, paranoid and sick the fabulously rich really are: every client they sent fit into that category. Oh yes, and there was another unspoken condition attached to the generosity they had shown me: certain cases I had to win, no matter what. Bribing became my principle forensic skill. I’ve been doing it for so long now, I could do it standing on my head. I can even do it without saying anything: I know all the tea ladies in all the government and corporate departments who are trusted to take brown paper envelops from one office to another, concealed under the dish cloths on their trolleys. There are a lot of wealthy tea ladies in Bangkok.