Bangkok Noir -- A Cheap Ticket to Thailand?

There’s a thriving crime fiction scene in Bangkok. Writers like Colin Cotterill, John Burdett and Christopher G. Moore have lived in Thailand and published titles set there. Their writing is as hot as a Thai curry. Here are a few examples: 

Bangkok 8: A Royal Thai Detective Novel by John Burdett

“The African American marine in the gray Mercedes will soon die of bites from Naja siamesis, but we don’t know that yet, Pichai and I (the future is impenetrable, says the Buddha). We are one car behind him at the toll for the expressway from the airport to the city and this is the closest we’ve been for more than three hours. I watch and admire as a huge black hand with a heavy gold signet ring on the index finger extends from the window, a hundred-baht note clipped stylishly between the pinky and what our fortune tellers call the finger of the sun.

Killed at the Whim of a Hat: Jim Jurree #1 by Colin Cotterill

(voice of the protagonist, a thirty-something Thai female journalist) “That was as far as I managed to get with the fertile prose version. It takes it out of you, writing with heart. And it was just for me really. Sort of a confirmation to myself that my inner diva can still make love to the keyboard when she’s in the mood. I have to keep her roped and gagged when I’m writing for the newspapers. They don’t like her at all. They don’t want love. They want a quick tryst in a motel room.” 

Spirit House: the Vincent Calvino Novels by Christopher G. Moore

“Around midnight the sky was a grayish-white mask with slits for a few stars. D.O.A. Bangkok was the only bar with huge cages of fruit bats suspended above the counter. Creatures as large as soi dogs hanging upside down, with their black wings folded close to their long, reddish bodies. Vincent Calvino, with a gun sloping out of his holster, walked over to the bar. Red neon whores flashed smiles, mouths filled with large teeth. Mouths that promised plenty of tongue action. One, in a silk dress slit up to her thighs, had a hustler’s smile.”

Okay, more on the implications of this last quote and others like it in a moment. There’s so much crime fiction pouring out of Thailand that there’s a Bangkok’s Writer’s Guild composed of expat noir writers. There are periodic readings called Night of Noir. Burdett, Moore and others contributed to Bangkok Noir, one of Akashic Books’ innumerable globe-trotting noir anthologies.

I’m a sucker for murder mysteries and adventure thrillers set in colorful, exotic and weird (to me) locales. It’s painless vicarious travel through space and time for the price of a book with hours of entertainment to distract me from the here-and-now as needed. And these authors are interesting guys. John Burdett is a policeman’s son from London who reportedly earned a small fortune working as a lawyer in Hong Kong and then lived in the south of France, Thailand and Hong Kong. Also from London, Colin Cotterill held teaching positions in Israel, Australia, Japan and the US before settling in Laos and then Thailand. His work on protection of children from sex-trafficking inspired his first novel, The Night Bastard. Christopher G. Moore was a law professor at the University of British Columbia. He moved to Thailand in the 80s and has alternated literary and genre fiction since.

There are other names in the Bangkok noir scene. James A. Newman wrote a series of novels set in Thailand featuring fraud expert Joe Dylan. Like Burdett and Cotterill, he’s a Londoner who settled in Thailand and started writing about “Thailand's garish netherworld of private eyes, prostitutes, pimps, gangsters, cops and dirty tricks.” (Quote from Tom Vater, yet another freelance writer living in Thailand.) Jake Needham, also a lawyer by training, is a former resident of Hong Kong and Singapore although he’s American by birth. He wrote the Inspector Samuel Tay series following a senior homicide detective in Singapore, and the Jack Shepherd series about a former DC lawyer who lived in Thailand but ends up in Hong Kong working as a ‘troubleshooter’ for rich people. His most well-known novel is The Big Mango (comparing Bangkok to ‘the big apple’) about a couple of guys from Cali who seek a treasure, lost during the fall of Saigon, in the gritty – you guessed it – netherworld of Bangkok.

Lots of fun here with an urban landscape varying between Siam Paragon mall with a $942,000 Rolls Royce Ghost parked inside to Klong Toei slum where pink meth abounds and fires spread faster than addiction. The novels are peopled with rogue CIA agents, Chinese gangsters, corrupt or meditative Thai police and plenty of smiling bar girls. They’re almost always smiling if they’re not dead.

You may have noticed all these writers of Southeast Asian crime fiction are male expats. I looked for female authors, found one. Angela Savage, an Australian, has written a couple books on a Bangkok PI. Even champions of Bangkok Noir acknowledge a dearth of Thai authors. So when we talk about Thai crime fiction we’re talking about Thai landscapes and culture seen through the eyes of an English-speaking male foreigner. Should we let a buzzing mosquito of guilt – is it the white man’s job to represent Thai culture in fiction? – interfere with our enjoyment of such a colorful panorama and exotic action sequences? Isn’t fiction, particularly genre fiction, all about escape?

Consider the smiling bar girls. The Thai government has passed several laws designed to curtail international sex tourism in Thailand, but it mostly persists. Experts believe the majority of these smiling young women are really young, i.e. minors. Should we buy portrayals of the bar girls as an accurate depiction of Thai norms for sexual behavior, meaning they’re just more comfortable with sex than we are? What is the reality behind fictional descriptions of red-light districts like Bangkok’s Patpong and Nana Plaza?

The presence of American GI’s during the Korean and Vietnam Wars promoted prostitution in Southeast Asia, and globalization, pandemics, grotesque wealth inequality and patriarchal norms have kept it booming. According to the Global Slavery Index, the trafficking industry in Thailand accounts for over $12 billion annually and 600,000 victims. It’s bigger than the drug trade. Some argue the bar girls are free to come and go and turn down clients. But poverty is an effective jailer. Most come from impoverished areas where prostitution to foreigners may be the only way to support family members. 

So if a writer portrays bar girls as enticing young women willing to have sex, all the economic factors pushing them to do this disappear. Back to that quote above from Christopher G. Moore. It continues saying Vincent Calvino “leaned over on his elbows, and looked down the bar at the girl purring like a cat in heat.” These authors are aspiring to continue the noir tradition. But we’ve had eighty years to rethink the femme fatale stereotype. Is this the best they can do?

Like I said, I love engaging crime novels set abroad. And I haven’t read enough of these authors to fairly critique the good and the bad. But this is my trepidation: When expat male Anglophone writers provide our access to a distant culture, what we’re getting is an imposition of a western genre format on some white dude’s imaginary version of a cultural landscape he can’t truly comprehend. Anthropologists tie themselves in knots trying to manage the problem of how to, or even if it’s possible to, effectively translate cultures. Bangkok noir updates the chivalric romance: an alienated tough guy travels through dangerous worlds, sword in hand. Here we just paint the scenery with the forms and faces of a Thai world. Let me know what you think!

Available March 31!