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: 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).