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.

Off The Beaten Track: Kwei Quartey’s Murder in Paradise

Kwei Quartey was born in Ghana and raised by an African-American mother and a Ghanaian father, both of whom were university lecturers. Even though his professional writing career began after he became a physician, his desire to be a writer began at the early age of eight. Kwei Quartey’s debut novel, WIFE OF THE GODS, was released by Random House Publishers in July 2009. CHILDREN OF THE STREET is his second work (2011), and his third, MURDER AT CAPE THREE POINTS, which features Ghana’s new oil industry as a backdrop, comes out mid-2013. Kwei Quartey now lives in Pasadena, California. He writes early in the morning before setting out to work at HealthCare Partners, where he runs a wound care clinic. 

Forty miles off the coast of Ghana in the Atlantic Ocean’s Gulf of Guinea is a drilling rig belonging to Malgam Oil, a multinational petroleum company that has been operating in Ghana’s territorial waters for 18 months. Large offshore reserves were discovered there in 2007, and production began 40 months later in 2010.

A semi-submersible rig used by Malgam Oil

Malgam’s oil rig is protected by the Ghana Navy Service (GNS), which often finds itself in conflict with Ghanaian fishermen who venture far out to sea to catch fish with large nets that can get snagged on oil drilling installations. Fishing canoes are not allowed to approach the rig within a 500-meter radius.

Four months ago, a fisherman’s 12-foot-long canoe breached that boundary, and the rig’s oil installation manager alerted the GNS. A man and woman occupied the vessel, but they weren’t paddling it. There was good reason for that: they were dead. Two corpses crumpled together in the floor of the canoe, both shot in the head at close range.

A shocking turn of events. Fictional, as it turns out. Although there really is an oil rig 40 miles off Ghana’s coast, it belongs to Tullow, not the imaginary “Malgam,” and the tale of the corpse-containing canoe is from the opening scene of my upcoming novel, Murder at Cape Three Points.

However, there’s nothing fictional about the geographic location of Cape Three Points in the Western Region of Ghana. In 2011 when I chose to include its name in the title of my novel, I hadn’t yet visited the spot. When I finally made it there in March 2012, I discovered I had unknowingly selected an extraordinarily lovely site to set a murder. Sometimes called the “land nearest nowhere,” because it is the closest land to a central point on the globe that is zero latitude, longitude and altitude, its name derives from three peninsulas that jut parallel to each other into the Atlantic.

The small fishing village of Cape Three Points lies on the center peninsula. 

Shoreline at the Cape Three Points Village, where fishing is the main livelihood

I went up into the working lighthouse that affords magnificent views over the bay.

Cape Three Points lighthouse, one of Ghana's five lighthouses

View of the bay from the lighthouse, with the third peninsula in the background

Walking some distance from the lighthouse, I came to stand at the edge of a cliff, at the bottom of which is a majestic spectacle of sight and sound. The waves crashing against the rocks send up a gossamer spray that stays suspended in the air for a few seconds before dissipating.

I wouldn't go any closer to the edge if I were you.

It's a spectacular show of sight and sound.

My murder plot mind always at work, I couldn’t help thinking about how perfectly awful it would be for someone to slip, fall and be dashed against those cruel rocks. Accidentally, of course.

Both a beautiful and treacherous landscape

Indeed, on seeing the young man pictured above fishing off the craggy cliffs, I did think about such a scenario for my plot, but I decided not to fiddle with what I already had – a corpse-carrying canoe adrift in the Atlantic Ocean.

How could this canoe with its dead bodies have gotten so far out to sea? It was probably towed by another canoe under paddle, wind or motor power. Many are surprised that fishermen go out as far as forty to fifty miles from the shore to catch fish, but they do. Ghana now faces a crisis of rapidly dwindling fish populations. Fishermen claim that the oil industry is making the situation even worse, which the petroleum folks deny. Hence the animosity between the two groups.

There are lots of places along the lovely coast of Ghana’s Western Region where you could quietly launch a canoe at night with a couple of dead bodies, like Ezile Bay, an almost achingly lovely location a few kilometers from Cape Three Points village.

This is a scene right out my novel, Murder At Cape Three Points

I recommend you select a less moonlit night for your nefarious deed, however.

Ezile Bay Village is a small and delightful resort owned by French couple Olivier and Danielle Funfschilling.

Dawn at Ezile Bay

Mid-morning low tide at Ezile Bay

Hilltop view of Ezile Bay with the village of Akwidaa in the background

Akwidaa fishermen coming home

There are many sinister countryside settings in the mystery-writing tradition – think of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Adventure of the Speckled Band, which is said to have been inspired by a story recounted in 1891 by a captain who had been dispatched to West Africa. But there’s also something chilling about murder in beautiful places, where one doesn’t expect to come across heinous crimes.

In Murder at Cape Three Points, there is another uncomfortable juxtaposition: wild beauty against the threat of an oil spill that could mar the incomparable setting like the slash of a knife across the face of a beautiful woman. Such a catastrophe could jeopardize the wildlife that exists at Cape Three Points and points offshore, including dolphins and whales. In an environment as stunning as this, that would be like murder in paradise.

Cape Three Points Village