Off The Beaten Track--Why Write About England?

We're pleased to host author Jeri Westerson today as our guest poster. Jeri seems permanently ensconced in fourteenth century England, writing about Crispin Guest, her hard-boiled medieval detective in her latest medieval noir BLOOD LANCE, in print, ebook, and audiobook. For a series booktrailer, go to her website www.JeriWesterson.com.

Mystery authors like to choose the locations of their stories carefully. I know authors who choose certain cities and towns intentionally so they can build in a readymade readership. Readers like recognizing the café they frequent or the hair dresser or the main street the protagonist finds the body.

Other authors will choose a place and change it subtly to work with the landscape they need in their stories. Santa Teresa is a stand-in for Santa Barbara in Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series, for instance.

But I chose London. And not just any London, but a fourteenth century one. Now although London is a real place, the fourteenth century London is long gone. I know that we think of England as eternal and unchanging, but a city like London, even with its few remaining Dickensian streets, has changed a lot. Two great fires saw to that along with just the regular amount of tearing down and building up.

I have a few copies of maps from about the early fourteenth century and a stunning one from the sixteenth century. What enthralls me about these two maps is how much London grew in two hundred years and how much it also remained the same.

London began as a Roman settlement—Londinium—but even before the Romans arrived, the prehistoric natives had sporadically settled in the area. William the Conqueror, the last successful invader to England, secured the Anglo-Saxon walls around the city and built his keep within it. We know this keep today as the Tower of London. The walls of Anglo-Saxon London stretch from Ludgate and Newgate to the west, to Cripplegate and Bishopsgate in the north, Aldgate in the east, and Dowgate in the south. Over the centuries, farmland began to be gobbled up for more and more city dwellers, well outside the city’s original walls. And the Thames, once its own sort of border, became merely one more thoroughfare, cutting the city in two. The north side was where all the main attractions were and the Bankside in Southwark, was traditionally the place where the brothels and low-life’s lived. Since actors were also considered low-lifes, the southbank is also where they put the theatres in Shakespeare’s day.

By the sixteenth century, we can see how much the city had spread outward. The city of Westminster was only a few miles from the heart of London. But London encroached so much into the land between, that there is no telling where London leaves off and Westminster begins. And Westminster is where the kings had their palace, the footprint of which is covered today by the Parliament buildings where Big Ben’s Tower stands.

I am attracted to the long-lived history of England. And I gave a clue to that in a paragraph above. I stated that William the Conqueror was the last successful invader of England…and that was almost a thousand years ago. I don’t think any other country in the world can boast of that.

And it is that settled history that allows for traditions to carry on to this day. England had a brief period during their civil war in the seventeenth century where they abolished the monarchy (curse you, Oliver Cromwell!) but the people, having had enough of the Lord Protector’s puritanical attitudes, brought it back. There is a ceremony in the Tower of London where they perform to this day the oldest continuous military ceremony—something that they’ve been doing at the Tower for seven hundred years—called the Ceremony of the Keys, where a warder of the Tower locks all the castle’s gates in a procedure that takes ten minutes. And he--or someone like him--has done this every single night for the last seven hundred years. The warder was only slightly late once during World War II when London was being blitzed by the Germans. A bomb fell close to the Tower and the warder and his guards had to duck for cover…and then they proceeded on with it. They sent an apologetic note to the king. Now that’s tradition, people.

And I love that. I love the continuity of the English. I love that they love their pomp and traditions and have maintained them for generations. There will always be an England, or so it seems. And it’s fun to write about it and have my fictional protagonist Crispin Guest wade into the real history and make a home for himself there. I love that I can look at a fourteenth century map of London and put his dwelling on a real street and then look on Google Earth and find that same street still there. I giggle with delight at such permanence because I live in southern California, where even the ground doesn’t stay in one place all the time. Oh for permanence!

Off the Beaten Track: I Came to Casablanca for the Waters

We're pleased to have writer Jake Needham as our guest blogger this week. Jake is an American crime novelist who lives in Bangkok. His crime novels set in contemporary Asia include: THE AMBASSADOR'S WIFE, A WORLD OF TROUBLE, KILLING PLATO, LAUNDRY MAN, and THE BIG MANGO. His latest Inspector Tay novel, THE UMBRELLA MAN, will be released next month. The print editions of Jake's novels are distributed only in Europe, Asia, and the UK, where they have all been bestsellers. Happily, the e-book editions of his novels are available worldwide. Jake has lived and worked in Asia for over twenty-five years. Read more about Jake's books at his website, http://jakeneedham.com.

            

When I am in the United States and my city of residence comes up in conversation, I am usually asked — and almost always in a tone laden with wariness and suspicion — why in the world I am living in a place like Bangkok.

Bangkok. All photos courtesy Jake Needham.

Sadly, I cannot simply reply with Humphrey Bogart's famous line when he was asked how he came to be in Casablanca. I can make no claim to being misinformed. I had lived in Asian cities for a long time before I took up residence in Bangkok, and I knew exactly what I was getting into.

I have come in a perverse way to look forward to this track conversations with my fellow Americans seem to take whenever they learn that I am living in Bangkok. Instead of expressing curiosity about my life in the distant and exotic city that I call my home, my interlocutors seem far more intent on telling me what they think of the place.

Of course, very few Americans seemed to know much of anything about any place that is not America, but still it surprised me that I hardly ever meet anyone back in the United States who has anything at all to say about Bangkok, other than on one of two topics.

Food is one of those topics, naturally. Everyone claims to love Thai food. Going out for Chinese is cheap. Going out for Thai seems somehow hipper. Of course, most Westerners have no real idea what they are actually eating in either case, but Thai food is both cheap and hip, so how can you beat that?

The other topic, as you might guess, is sex. Bangkok is inexorably linked in most people’s minds with stories they have heard somewhere -- although I notice few people admit to remembering exactly where -- of an unabashedly dissolute life and the ready availability of free sex. Well, perhaps not exactly free, but certainly pretty inexpensive sex, at least by world standards. Thai sex is a little like Thai food, cheap but with a kind of exotic style to it. Can’t beat that combination in any context, can you?

With all that going for it, you might think that the idea of me actually living in Bangkok would be pretty interesting to most people, wouldn’t you? You might think that, but you’d be wrong.

A couple of times I tried joking that, well, a man could sure make a lot worse choice than taking up residence in a city that is internationally famed for food and sex. But when I saw the solemn expressions that crack generally engendered in most Americans, I swiftly eliminated it from my repertoire. Maybe the suggestion that food and sex are important parts of life makes Americans uncomfortable. Maybe I ought to have more friends from France.

Anyway, the inevitable view people express when they find out that I live in Bangkok is something I have learned to live with. Oh, the place is no doubt interesting, people murmured, but yet . . . somehow it's still a city where a lot of people go who aren’t particularly…well, nice.

To be absolutely honest with you here, I have to admit that perception isn't really too far off the mark.

I have often thought there has to be some kind of international network devoted to coaxing social rejects and dropout cases worldwide into coming to Bangkok, because come they do. By the thousands, they walk away from third-shift jobs in places like Los Angeles, London, Berlin, and Toronto, pack what they have, buy a cheap airline ticket, and make their way to the Land of Smiles.

Some are looking for a cheap tropical paradise; others hope they’ve joined a nonstop orgy; but almost every one of them is intending in some way to make a fresh start on a life that until then had very little to recommend it. Many of these refugees from reality probably couldn’t have located Bangkok on a map before they decided it was the place for them, maybe they still can’t, but now Bangkok had become their last, maybe their only hope.

In the empty hours, this army of the dispossessed takes control of the part of the city where most foreigners live. Tuk-tuks, little three-wheeled motorcycle taxis, fly back and forth most of the night ferrying carousers between the two clumps of bars that anchor the neighborhood: Nana Plaza on the west and Soi Cowboy about a mile to the east.

They are all there. The lonely, the frightened, the guilty, the lost, the vulnerable, the depressed, and the psychotic. Soaked with sweat, they rush back and forth from one bar to another, reeking of that peculiarly sour, metallic odor habitually given off by the emotionally overmatched and underachieving.

So, I hear you ask, how in the world did you end up in Bangkok?

It happened this way…

Back a couple of decades ago now, HBO hired me to produce a movie they were making from a screenplay I had sold them. It was to be filmed in Bangkok and, since I lived in Asia and presumably knew something about it, they thought it sensible to add me to the corps of so-called producers that every movie drags around behind it like a modern version of the old time camp followers that every army attracted.

Regardless of HBO’s wisdom in putting me on the payroll, I must tell you now that I am grateful beyond measure that they did.

The woman who is now my wife was born in Thailand and educated in England (thank heaven it wasn’t the other way around). She was doing a stint at the time as the editor of the Thai edition of the UK magazine, Tatler, and she came out to the set one day to interview me. A year later we were married. Twenty years later, we have two sons and are still living in Bangkok .

So there you have it. That is how I came to be resident in a city that most Americans seem to think of as little more than adult Disneyland for the dodgy and the disreputable. Only with better food.

Admit it. You're actually a bit disappointed, aren't you? Maybe you expected something a little more…well, spicy?

I rest my case.

Trouble's Brewing in Bangkok

By Beth Green

I read for the pleasure of slipping into another place. Of being able to, unseen, explore worlds and venues I wouldn’t dare peek into in real life. I read because I like to step into a character’s skin and experience the world through their senses, filtered through their personal histories. 

And that’s why I have enjoyed reading John Burdett’s Sonchai Jitpleecheep series. Set in Bangkok, Thailand, the books follow Buddhist police detective Sonchai as he struggles to balance the damage the job does to his soul with the good he’s doing the world. Sonchai is half-Thai, half-American, and he both bridges the two cultures and is marginalized by both. He is shunned, or sometimes raised up, by Thais who think he’s a foreigner, yet feels uncomfortable embracing Western culture wholly.

Sonchai is a devout Buddhist—although his lifestyle is certainly non-devout—and the references to religion and Sonchai’s constant upkeep of his soul set him apart from other mystery narrators I’ve read. Mysticism also lends him a hand in his police investigations, tinging the otherwise noir thrillers with a touch of magical realism.

At odds with, yet somehow complimentary to the grisly cases Sonchai covers—snuff films, disembowelings, trafficking of all kinds—the dreamy first-person narration in the books is smooth and unrushed. The books are told in the present tense, which to be honest jarred me for the first few pages. This unusual style, however, emphasizes Sonchai’s attempts to catch the moments of his life even as he seems to look back on it from a distant future standpoint.

Sonchai’s mother is a former prostitute who still has business with “the Game,” as Sonchai refers the sex industry. Because of his mixed parentage and flawless English, Sonchai is often asked to take on difficult cases (usually dealing with dead foreigners), and his investigations bring him into contact with people all over the spectrum of Bangkok—from canal taxi drivers to Japanese mobsters, from drug smugglers to Russian hookers and from FBI agents to Tibetan holy men.

I lived in Thailand for five months and have visited Bangkok several times. I have myself wandered down the red light district streets, giggling at (and yes, a little scared of) the absurdity of the flesh trade there. Burdett’s books take the reader into a fascinating, and sordid, world where the farm girls turning tricks have purer hearts than the policemen who don’t always manage to protect them from harm. Sonchai, a character raised in brothels, is both a jaded cop and a perpetual innocent. He is both a hero and a coward.

The series currently has five books. The newest novel, Vulture Peak, is still on my to-read list; I’m waiting to finish some of the other books I have going so that I can fully immerse myself in Sonchai’s world. The previous four books were quick reads that I wished I’d savored properly, and I hope to do that for this one.

The Sonchai books start with mesmerizing Bangkok 8. This thriller introduces quirky Sonchai on one of the worst days of his life. His best friend, with whom he seems to have a link through past lives (this is the Buddhism theology and shades of magical realism coming in), is killed by snakes, and Sonchai struggles to deal with both the loss of Pichai and his increasingly demanding job.  

 

In the following Bangkok Tattoo, the reader follows Sonchai even deeper into personal territory—his mother’s business and his family history. A prostitute working for his mother may have murdered an American CIA agent. Complicating this, Sonchai thinks he’s in love with the suspect. 

 

Bangkok Haunts may be my favorite of the four books I’ve read so far. In this one, Sonchai is an expectant father trying to find the maker of a horrific snuff film. He now has a transgender assistant, Lek, adding to the eccentric, memorable cast of characters.

In The Godfather of Kathmandu, the slightly comic figure of Colonel Vikorn, Sonchai’s boss, decides he wants to be a Mafia don and sends Sonchai off to Nepal to help Vikorn smuggle heroin—not the usual practice of either a devout Buddhist or an idealistic cop. In Nepal, Sonchai meets Tibetan refugees who blow his mind.

The next book, Vulture Peak (did I mention I’m looking forward to it?) deals with human organ trafficking and infidelity.

The author, John Burdett, is originally from England. He lived in Hong Kong for several years, became interested in Thailand, and now, according to his website, divides his time between Bangkok and France.

Burdett’s books turn sultry Bangkok—best remembered by many tourists for its shining golden temples, dirt-cheap shopping and slightly Disney-fied red light district—into a labyrinth of intrigue. When I settle down with a book to follow Sonchai through his moral and work-related adventures, I know the city—in fact, the whole country of Thailand—will open up for me in a way it never did when I was actually there.

Off The Beaten Track: Crime Around the World

By day, Glenn Harper is the unassuming editor of Sculpture magazine, writes for numerous art magazines, journals, and books, and has edited several books about art and culture. But by night, Glenn has a dark side: he’s been reviewing international crime fiction since 2005 at internationalnoir.blogspot.com. Take a tour of the world of crime with him below or scroll through to find your favorite hot spot.

International crime novels offer much more than a portrait of crime around the world. The following novels (drawn from the last six months of my blog/reviews) are a window on the cultures of these diverse continents and countries, crime being a perfect vehicle for a portrait not of the high and mighty but the people on the streets (mean or otherwise).

Europe:

Timothy Williams in the crime fiction world was recently included in a list of the top 10 European crime writers in The Guardian (yet he's surely the least well-known name on the list). His Commissario Trotti series is perhaps the best of the distinguished crop of non-Italian crime fiction writers whose work is set in Italy, a literary generation that includes Donna Leon, Magdalen Nabb, and Michael Dibdin.

All of these writers share a jaundiced yet appreciative view of Italy: dismayed by the politics and seduced by the culture. But Williams digs deeper into the real social and historical background, from the "years of lead" and the kidnapping of Moro through a series of scandals in government and church, as well as campaigns against corruption, leading to the "mani pulite" years of the '90s, which is the background of Big Italy, the fifth and latest of the Trotti novels. In all of his books, Williams filters the big, historical events through the lens of small, local events and people, accenting the impact of social patterns on the daily life of individuals.

That all sounds dry and stuffy, which the novels are anything but. As with all of Williams’ books, Big Italy progresses mostly through the often oblique dialogue of the Commissario, his associates, and the suspects. The effect is frequently both frustrating and comical, as well as reinforcing the overall sense that what is really going on remains resolutely below the surface of events.

Big Italy has, like the other Trotti novels and most crime fiction set in Italy, a less-than-conclusive ending, without the absolute resolution of much mystery writing. But there's a note of hope at the end: hope for the future of some of the individual characters and for the goals for which they had been striving, if not confidence in the future of the country as a whole.

Asia:

The Big Mango, by Jake Needham (another émigré writer), is a confident thriller that builds up to its explosive conclusion rather than blowing people and things up from the beginning. The story is more in the line of author Eric Ambler than that of many recent thrillers, taking an ordinary guy and thrusting him, in frequently comic ways, into an unfamiliar and unfriendly situation. The writing is clear and evocative, whether in portraying San Francisco in the early chapters or Bangkok for the majority of the book, and the characters are lively and interesting. 

The story is set in the '90s (originally published in Asia in 1999, The Big Mango was reprinted in 2010 by Marshall Cavendish in Singapore; the only editions so far have been limited to Asian publishers and distributors). Eddie, a small-time lawyer and former Vietnam-era marine, starts getting threatening mail and visitors that refer to his time in Vietnam, when he worked in a squad involved in guarding the U.S. embassy in the waning days of the U.S. presence.

The maguffin is the stuff of legends, urban and otherwise: it seems the gold and currency from the Bank of Vietnam vanished during the chaos of the U.S. departure, and someone (several someones, as it turns out) thinks Eddie's former captain knows what happened to the money, and maybe Eddie does too. After a visit from the U.S. Secret Service, Eddie gets an offer from a mystery man offering him a lot of money to go to Bangkok to look for the captain and the money.

From there, Eddie becomes involved with a shady crew: his old Army buddy, a laid-back bookstore owner and Native American; an American in Bangkok who writes a column on the nightlife there; a DEA agent; and various other Americans, Thais, and Vietnamese. It's a story told from the point of view of outsiders, seduced by Thailand but not blind to the pollution, corruption, and violence of the capital city. 

The other book I've read by Needham, The Ambassador's Wife, is quite different, more of an insider's look at another Asian crossroads, Singapore (which Needham also views with a jaundiced eye). And The Ambassador's Wife is a police procedural whereas The Big Mango is more of a slowly building adventure story.

Africa:

I liked the first Jade de Jong novel, Random Violence, by Jassy Mackenzie, and the second one, Stolen Lives, is even better. The first half of the novel dragged me along relentlessly. There's a plot line that in the second half seems a bit tacked on (though it leads to a twisty and cliff-hanger-y ending). It deals with a character who could be very interesting but isn't fully developed—but overall the novel (and especially that second half) are very good indeed.

Jade has returned (in the first novel, Random Violence) to her native Johannesburg to bring her private detective business there—as well as to a) inflict some revenge and b) reestablish contact with the object of her (mostly unrequited) passion, detective David Patel of the J-burg police. Patel refers a client to Jade, thinking that it's just a woman in need of straightforward bodyguarding after her husband has disappeared, but the case becomes complicated when Jade and the client are shot at and later the husband is discovered nearly dead from extreme torture and their daughter goes missing. Then David's son, who has been living with his estranged wife, is kidnapped...

There is a parallel case developing in England, concerning brothels and human trafficking, which ties into Jade's case and links to a deadly and mysterious character at the fringes of both: an African man whom we glimpse in a pawn shop and other locales in several chapters interspersed with the English plot and Jade's case. The threads come together in an unexpected way, forcing the reader to reassess his or her opinion about the characters. And Jade herself is very interesting: we follow not only her professional exploits but also her troubled relationship with David and a discovery about herself and her heritage that she makes in connection with her current case.

The novel offers once again a dynamic glimpse of post-Apartheid South Africa in all its grime and glory, as well as thematic consideration of violence and its roots in culture (and perhaps genetics), marriage, and desire: it's among the best of the substantial crop of South African crime fiction now becoming available.

Several recent crime novels published in the U.S. by African writers north of South Africa (from Ghana and Nigeria in particular) promise more crime fiction from the continent as a whole—not to mention one of the best books I’ve read this year, City of Veils, by Zoë Ferraris, which is set in Saudi Arabia (and is a novel that could probably only have been written by an outsider).

 

Australia: 

Wyatt, the latest Garry Disher novel to arrive in the U.S., is a continuation of his Wyatt series (about a dispassionate thief) rather than his police-procedural series (better known here in the States). Wyatt recalls the noir end of Donald Westlake's oeuvre. (For those not in the know, Westlake is one of the most prodigious and well-known U.S. writers of noir fiction). And in fact, Disher offers an homage to Westlake with two names that appear in Wyatt: Stark, one of Westlake's several pseudonyms, and Parker, one of his longest-running characters. Disher's Wyatt character has similarities with Parker, a master thief for whom things are always going wrong. But in the new novel, Wyatt is confronting problems that Parker didn't have to: money that moves electronically rather than physically, new security systems, and the constantly rising surveillance of our world today.

The characters in the Wyatt series are pretty much stock characters, interesting in their own way but reduced to their relevance to Wyatt (though the narrative does depart from the central character a good deal of the time). And Wyatt himself is always guarded, always careful, never emotional. He is a particular sort of sociopath: without empathy or even interest in his fellow humans; he's almost high-functioning autistic.

There's a telling passage in which he is attracted to the central woman character (who is one of the most interesting characters, as she veers from normal life into Wyatt's world and then into Wyatt's point of view). He feels the attraction but doesn't quite know what to do about it. Wyatt is super competent in other ways, and his inability to understand affection or to act on attraction keeps him human, in an odd way. He isn't vulnerable, but he's damaged.

The plotting is the outstanding characteristic of the Wyatt series. Through the twists and turns, Disher manages to manipulate the standard tropes of the noir-heist story in lively ways, much as Westlake did (though without the overt comedy that Westlake often employed). Disher's Wyatt (the novel and the character) are as dark as they come, but engaging and involving for the reader. Wyatt seems in some ways to be a posthumous tribute to Westlake, and is definitely both an excellent novel in its own right and the best "post-Westlake" take on that master's style that I've read.

South America:

Every Bitter Thing, Leighton Gage’s fourth “Chief Inspector Mario Silva Investigation” is his best book yet. The language is lucid, it’s informative about Brazilian life and culture (the reader even finds out how Rio de Janeiro got its name), the characters are well defined (and their interaction is natural and often comic), and the plot moves along inexorably and rapidly. It is a story that is closer to the kind of crime novel I’m most interested in as well: the first three Silva stories dealt with big issues (organ theft, human trafficking, disparities of social class and property ownership) and often with torture, organized crime, and extreme violence. Every Bitter Thing, on the other hand, deals with murder and revenge at a personal level, committed not by professional criminals but by more-or-less ordinary people under extreme pressure (which could also be said of the victims of the crimes). There are, I should say, some vividly mutilated corpses, though.

It’s also a police procedural in the best sense of the term: each member of Silva’s team is a three-dimensional character, and each has his or her separate role in the investigation. The investigation ranges across Brazil, but is focused more on Brasilia (where Silva’s federal police team is based) than the previous books as well. The nose-to-the-ground view of the investigators at work gives a quite different focus, in comparison with the first three Silva  books, which showed a lot more about the crime and the criminals: Every Bitter Thing, as a result, is far more than just a mystery or a procedural. Though a reader may figure out what’s going on before the end, the investigators are figuring it out at about the same time (and both readers and investigators will will have figured it out by the final couple of twists).