Christopher G. Moore Collected Essays (The Cultural Detective / Faking It in Bangkok / Fear and Loathing in Bangkok)

By Christopher G. Moore

Christopher G. Moore Collected Essays

The Cultural Detective

For more than twenty years, Christopher G. Moore has been writing about the history, culture and politics of Southeast Asia, in particular Thailand. The Cultural Detective is a behind-the-scene view into Moore’s writing life.

In this selection of essays, Moore discusses with the humor and insight that he has become famous for. He draws widely on anthropology, neurology, psychology, ethnography, history and recent political conflicts.

Readers new to Moore’s work will find an entertaining and discerning author worth getting to know better, while fans will recognize an echo of his essayist’s voice and perspective from his novels.

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Faking It in Bangkok

The Cultural Detective established Christopher G. Moore as a writer whose essays deliver a unique perspective insight into Thai culture and contemporary political and social issues. In Faking It in Bangkok gangsters, gamblers, killers and other criminals are brought to life in the essays. Readers who follow Moore’s crime novels will enjoy his detours through the hard-edged noir world of Thailand with whistle stops on the digital age express. Moore’s signature irony and humor riffs are also not to be missed as he explores an eclectic range of subjects, from ghosts and fortunetellers to the de facto tribal seating on the BTS.

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Fear and Loathing in Bangkok

TV images and news reports of demonstrations, deaths, demands and chaos in Thailand make Moore’s essays in Fear and Loathing in Bangkok a timely book. These are essays to read at this vital crossroads in Thai political development. The essays will deepen your understanding of what makes Thailand a special and unique country.

Politics can’t be judged in isolation. Moore provides a context ranging from the petty local and foreign criminals and to the workings of the often quixotic law enforcement system. Murder, organized crime, greed and shadowy corporations reveal the half-hidden world of Thailand.

In an age of anger and fear, the culture of non-confrontation and smiles is going through a rocky ride. These essays take you along the bumpy road of ghosts, criminals, illegal migrants, and false prophets. The essays on crime fiction and on writing explore noir, chance, muses, and ideas—the ingredients of Moore’s successful Vincent Calvino crime novel series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HeavenLakePress
• Release date: Apr 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311898722

Christopher G. Moore

Christopher G. Moore is a Canadian citizen and formerly taught law at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of nine novels featuring Vincent Calvino, and the winner of the Deutscher Krimi Preis, Germany's most prestigious award for crime fiction. He has lived in Bangkok since 1988.Both The Risk of Infidelity Index and Spirt House are published by Atlantic.

Book preview

PART II

Clues to Solving Cultural Mysteries

The Deference Culture

The Polite Society

The Culture of Complaining

9

Auspicious Date

A Thai Ghost Story: The Land of Ghosts, Spirits and Demons

The Duck in My Kitchen

Asian Women as Wife Trophy Material

Losing Your Sense of Time

Flight Distance

Friends in Strange Lands

The Schadenfreude Chronicles

Criminals and Terrorists

Torture and Secret Prisons

The Stolen Saudi Jewels

Balloon Chasers

No Need to Remove Your Shoes

The Rise of the Highchair in the East

The Nature of Crime

Where Do We Come from? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Information Assessment and Information Monopolies

PART III

Observations from the Frontlines

Bangkok at the Crossroad of History

Law of the Jungle

Hands in the Sky above Bangkok

PandaLive TV and Soldiers on Skytrain

May 17, 2010, Rama IV Barricades

The Fire Outside My Window, The Fire Inside My Heart

Bangkok War Zone: The Morning After

Report on Foreign Eyes

The Making and Casting of the Movie Thailand: A Messy Script War

Bandwidth, Social Networks and Political Dissent

The Quantum Curator of Images

PART IV

Outside the Southeast Asia Comfort Zone

Escape to India: Part 1

Escape to India: Part 2

Escape to India: Part 3

Passage to India

Notes on the Making of a Cultural Detective

For more than twenty years I have been writing stand-alone novels and crime fiction set in Southeast Asia. In my crime fiction the main character is Vincent Calvino, a New Yorker and an ex-lawyer who navigates these choppy cultural waters. Calvino, like most private investigators, searches to disclose the mysteries of a case. Unlike most literary detectives, he must also be a cultural detective when working on a job.

Crime doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it happens inside a particular culture, where a private eye, if he is to do his job, needs to understand the context of his assignment, attitudes toward certain crimes and privileged criminals, the role of law enforcement and courts, and the twists and turns inside a complex foreign language, history and social structure. As a cultural detective, Calvino needs to slip into the undercurrent of a foreign place, make it his own and find a way to make it the reader’s. He must be able to cross between two cultural worlds, slip back and forth, and bring accessibility and clarity to contradictory worldviews. A cultural detective has a mental map of more than one world as his guide.

I am not the only writer working the cultural terrain, mining language, history, attitudes and expectations with the intention of bringing authenticity to crime fiction set in distant lands. Peter Rozovsky’s Detectives Beyond Borders (http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com) is the premier destination for readers wishing to explore books from other crime fiction authors who have created their own cultural detectives. Peter’s blog has created a cultural detective community. He’s made our fiction hip, and for that he deserves recognition as the original crime fiction mapmaker. My fiction is one flag on that larger cultural map. There are many other flags flying. And all of these crime fiction authors have developed their own methods and techniques in gathering available resources and using them as part of the story.

These cultural aspects act like the operating system that a private investigator must use inside the community where he is working. The crime fiction terrain is different in Southeast Asia. The private eye’s use of lawyers, detectives and informants working in the power structure is defined by these people’s culture. A reader opens a crime novel set in Thailand because she is looking, at least in part, for those defining cultural details and elements that allow her to see the perspective of a murder case handled in Bangkok as opposed to New York, Toronto or London.

Culture in a crime novel isn’t icing on the cake; it is the stuff from which the cake is made. Who the heavies are and who does the heavy lifting within a society are not always apparent. The devil is in the details. In Thai tradition, at the cremation ceremony at a Buddhist temple, all of the deceased’s family, relatives and friends gather. Each person takes from a tray a small sandalwood flower called in Thai dok mai chan. The crematory fire is lit. The wooden coffin is in front of a queue and each person steps forward and tosses the dok mai chan onto the coffin. At that moment they ask for the deceased to forgive them for any transgression, insult or problem he or she might have caused them during their life.

What appears on the surface to be a particularly Thai practice can be traced back to Hindu cremation custom. For centuries in India sandalwood was used for the funeral pyre. The burning ceremony was a communal event, and practices fit the caste of the deceased. But sandalwood was expensive, and only a rich family could afford it to send off a relative to the afterlife. Over time, in Thailand the practice evolved. The large pieces of sandalwood used for the funeral pyre gradually were transformed into sandalwood shavings the Thais worked into the shape of a flower. That Hindu link to a Buddhist cremation has been thoroughly absorbed into Thai ritual.

The cultural detective understands that at a Buddhist cremation certain rules apply. For example, a polite Westerner at a Thai funeral might be tempted to show his or her politeness by picking up a dok mai chan and handing it to the person standing next in line. This is the automatic pilot behavior that explains a Westerner handing a plate to another person in a buffet line. It is an attempt to be nice. He or she wishes to show kindness by such a small gesture.

To hand a dok mai chan flower to a Thai is to suggest that the person receiving it will be next to die. It is akin to the Marlin Brando moment when he kisses one of the made men on both cheeks, sealing the plan to have him killed. In a crime novel it is precisely this kind of dok mai chan moment, an innocent exchange with unintended consequences, that creates the opportunity to pull back the cover on the cultural engine and look inside. If Calvino is in such a queue and a Thai hands him a dok mai chan, he gets the picture. If a foreigner fresh into Thailand gives Calvino a dok mai chan, the meaning is very different. His job is to understand the context, the rituals and their meaning. That’s how he solves mysteries and manages to stay alive to work on the next case.

In this book of essays, I set out my perspective on the writing process. There are universal elements that apply to writing wherever the writer and his material are located. That said, location, especially when it becomes an essential element in the story, creates a number of challenges for the writer. A novelist new to writing in Asia will find that he or she will gradually adapt characters and story to accurately reflect the cultural perspective. In this book I discuss the structuring and layering of fiction set in Thailand and surrounding countries including Cambodia, Vietnam and Burma. Other writers no doubt have their own ways of working and lessons they’ve learnt over the years. In Part I, I disclose my own working habits and trade secrets that I’ve learnt while gaining access to and drawing upon culture, language and history to create the characters and story.

In Part II, I discuss specific aspects of Thai culture and take you inside the Thai world, including cultural clues that solve mysteries. Part II illustrates other factors that come into the creative process. A crime novelist draws on many different domains of knowledge, including anthropology, neurology, psychology, ethnography and history. Without a basic understanding of the developments in these fields, I would find it difficult to keep the characters credible and true to what we know about living in the world. But numbers are not academic studies or field research reports. At the heart of a novel is human emotion. Two emotions that are found in most crime fiction are fear and rage. What makes us fearful and filled with rage certainly has cultural overlap, but there are entire spheres where the emotion is driven by something unique to the culture. That is the place I like to take my readers.

In Part III, I examine the way I set myself to observe life inside Thailand at a time of considerable political and social unrest and uncertainty. In ordinary circumstances, any sensible person would avoid such situations, but a novelist who wishes to understand the nature of the society he or she is writing about has no choice but to go into the street and witness the unfolding of history. It is at this juncture that a writer finds the worst and the best of people, and begins to understand how those characteristics come to the surface in times of crisis and conflict. I draw my stories from personal experience and observations, shaped and refined through imagination, with the intention of revealing to readers those hidden parts of the human psyche that are embedded in culture. The events of April and May 2010 in Bangkok are recorded in my observations from one of the frontlines in that urban conflict.

In Part IV, I take you to the place where I’ve traced the dok mai chan tradition—India, where I spent time writing a crime novel set in Thailand and New York. Part IV includes a meditation on the writing process, finding solitude and quiet with a strange, alien and stimulating culture in the dusty streets of an ancient Indian town. There is a tradition among writers in finding a coffee shop to set up a laptop and work through a draft in a public place. In my case, I prefer to find a remote place in another culture as my coffee shop, where I find a break from the usual bad habits (checking email and other online activities), phone calls and visitors and can disappear down the rabbit hole into a different universe from the one that I am writing about.

My colleagues at International Crime Authors

Reality Check (http://www.internationalcrimeauthors.com) Barbara Nadel, Matt Beynon Rees, and Colin Cotterill have been an inspiration and many of these essays appeared first on this website.

Introduction

I once was a prisoner in the cult of authenticity, skeptical of crime writers who wrote about countries other than their own. (Tourist that I am, I sneered at tourists.)

Christopher G. Moore plugs that attitude between the eyes early in the collection of essays you’re about to read. There is a tradition of pundits saying foreigners can’t understand how Thais think, he tells us. That is in itself an interesting theory of mind, suggesting that non-Thais are basically rendered autistic when it comes to understanding how Thais form intentions and the true nature of their beliefs.

That’s a neat trick, isn’t it? With a few taps on his key-board, Moore demonstrates that authenticity snobs of the kind I once was are nothing more than upscale propagandists for the old belief that Orientals are inscrutable.

Not that Moore has kind words for superficial literary tourism. We may not be able to understand others, runs his argument, but we must try. How else can we live in a world rushing headlong into globalized communications? The guide on the imaginative journey you are about to take, in other words, is bold enough to insist that travelers, literary and otherwise, must ask questions, but modest enough not to insist that he has all the answers.

Moore calls his protagonist, the Bangkok-based, half-Italian-American, half-Jewish private investigator Vincent Calvino, a cultural detective. What does this mean in Moore’s fiction? In Paying Back Jack, it means fast-paced thrills and leisurely meditation on the ways of the world—at the same time, in the same book. I’ll have to read the novel again to see how Moore manages this.

In Spirit House, it means a foreign lover assuring Calvino’s female Thai office assistant that the scar on her knee lends her character. But who wants character, Calvino tells us; that’s a Western thing. Thais want to conform to a model, to strive for harmony of the whole rather than individuality of the parts.

In The Risk of Infidelity Index, it means Calvino observing the ways of the Thais, but also the odd mannerisms and inexplicable customs of the farangs, or white foreigners, who live among them.

And it means hard work for a farang detective. At least in a culture where complaining and arguing is the norm, Moore writes in another essay here, in theory, you can see the anger rising and figure the getaway time before the knife flashes.

So, does Moore have an East-West thing going on? No, his is a shifting world, filled with qualifications like "In Thailand, until recent events, most people accepted with a kind of fatalism their place in the hierarchy."

He knows that Thais and farangs will observe one another with puzzlement, with discord, with efforts at understanding, even as fault lines rend their worlds. The new digital world may ultimately make governments more open and responsive, he writes. (But) this is a long-term vision and, like most visions, will only be realized after a thousand small steps, blood in the streets, and dismantling of the official lies and disinformation that have long been accepted as an ordinary part of the non-digital world.

And that, gentle readers, means a golden age of inter-national crime fiction.

Peter Rozovsky

Philadelphia, October 2010

Part I

Perspectives on Crime Fiction Writing

Writing Novels inside the Hive Mind

Something fundamental is changing in the hive mind. The thousands of human hives have been subject to globalization. These cultural, language and faith colonies are interconnected in ways unimaginable a hundred years ago.

It is not just the way we communicate. It is more the desire of people who are born and educated, work and die inside their cultural hive to see the influence they have to reshape the content and means of delivery of such communi-cation. The hive is glued together by language, culture and religion. Most of our lives we see ourselves as individuals; we see others the same way. But there is a collective life just below the surface of that life that lurks, rising up here and there like a submarine surveying the angry seas.

When tourists visit a foreign land, they see the outlines of the collective in the churches, mosques, museums, palaces and government buildings. Those are the artifacts of the hive’s past. Within these places are the collective life, which remains largely out of sight as the tourist is cut off by language, custom, tradition and ethnicity. Tourists by their very nature are strangers or outsiders, and while the locals are happy to provide hotels, restaurants and attractions to take their money, they know such people can bring a threat to the hive. Every hive has a list of taboos—things you can’t talk about in public—and each hive has guardians that vet public discussions. These guardians, who patrol the public communication lines, are generally distrustful of new ideas and ways of thinking, critical opinions or different values about authority, power, justice, fairness and wealth. Each hive creates a mentality that it is exceptional and unique. Survival depends on protecting such a delusion. Writers, the best ones, are delusion busters. In parts of the world such writers are murdered, imprisoned or thrown into prison. It is the way a human hive works.

No hive is stable, unchangeable over time. The balance between the place of the individual and the role of the collective ebbs and flows, shifts and transforms, and this can cause disturbance. Internal disagreement about the structures and values of the hive can break out into open rebellion, revolution, insurgency or civil war. We are cooperative by nature but also disagree as to the terms exacted for cooperation when they become a burden. I suspect that our private and collective selves are different expressions flowing from the same pathways. We each have our own personal mixture of private and collective selves that merge to create consciousness and identity. What looks from the outside like a patchwork of overhead Bangkok telephone and electric wires on Sukhumvit Road feels from the inside like one smooth, single transmission cable.

For authors of novels, this possibility of change has great implications. Our task has been to recreate the emotional temperature inside the various chambers and follow around the players to see who does what to whom and for what reason and what consequences follow. In books we work the hive’s definition of hell and characters caught in the clutches of such belief. Writers dramatize these fears using belief in everything from ghosts to everlasting punishment to illuminate life inside the hive. Our books are snared in these belief systems that create consensus and keep hive members in line. Also we like the rebels, those who refuse to consent to the beliefs and suffer the consequences, because to question the guardians of the hive takes courage. Most of us aren’t that brave.

We engage readers emotionally. That is our power and our limitation. Others would argue books provide escape. Fantasy packaged to waste hours otherwise spent in boredom. I am of the school that you read (or write) a book because you want to know something beyond the surface of life. In this world there is no time for escape into fantasy; there is too much to find out about the edge between fact and fiction. A novel is a good place to explore that borderline.

The hives depend upon communication links and communicators who use the links—the books, movies, music, newspaper, gossip and idle chatter that create a community. You can have face-to-face storytelling, the oral tradition. Or you can use modern technology for the hole in one: you narrate face-to-face storytelling and then use modern technology to transmit it to thousands or millions of strangers. Those strangers read the face-to-face story and believe that it says something about the characters, their motives and their intentions, and has causal connections that make for the scaffolding of a story. What is built inside the cultural hive comes out through the process of storytelling. It is rarely on the surface as a cultural artifact. Most storytellers are talking about their own history, through their own language, and finding and sharing a common identification of values, history and ethnicity.

We have a need for face-to-face interaction with others. We are foremost social beings, the kind of creature that is happiest inside the hive. One of the worst forms of punishment in ancient times was banishment or exile. In current times it would be solitary confinement. Books reach out and bring the others into the mental life of the reader. It is a simulation of the face-to-face interaction that the reader is looking to find.

Then there are authors like Rees, Cotterill, Nadal and me, who inhabit a foreign (to us) landscape and are writing books about the face-to-face interaction that happens in very difficult circumstances that are different from the ones we’ve been raised to deal with. I can’t speak for my fellow writers, but I wasn’t raised with an eye to preparing me to write about countries in Southeast Asia. A reality check of many books shows, at least to those who know, that the writers have only a superficial understanding of the hive mentality where they have set their books. They’ve scratched the surface. But they haven’t gone into the back rooms where the guardians live and work.

People are becoming more immobile, more stationary, with heads stuck in front of a screen for many hours more than anyone would care to admit. It makes what we do all the more odd. The irony of the Internet is that while in terms of screen time the users have never been so worldly, in terms of non-screen time people are becoming more insular and isolated from larger communities. The death of newspapers and foreign bureaus has contributed to the blackout; the same with TV coverage as the major networks and government stations have cut back on foreign correspondents, a dying breed if there ever was one. It is becoming more difficult to find out what goes on inside the collective mind of people inside other cultures. Authors who have embedded themselves in such hives are a continuing communication link to the collective mentality, and the view from inside the hive becomes more important over time. That is where the true differences in values, perceptions, ideals and goals are manufactured and delivered to the next generation.

Bangkok as Bletchley Park

I like the idea of the Enigma machine. It was used to decode encrypted messages during World War II. I also like the idea that during that war some of the smartest people in Britain worked together at Bletchley Park to crack the Germans’ secret code.

I also like metaphors. Enigma machine. Bletchley Park. They deserve to be dusted off and brought out to serve the cause of literature.

In my writing I have tried to create a cultural Enigma machine. Over the course of twenty novels, most of them set in Asia or with Asian themes, I have worked to understand the continent’s encrypted codes. I can’t say I’ve succeeded for all of Asia. But I have made progress in cracking some of the codes in Southeast Asia.

In The Corruptionist (2010) I started the book by using the Thai phrase nam phueng yod diew, or a drop of honey: It doesn’t sound like a big deal, I continued. More like a sweet nursery rhyme. That judgment is a big mistake. A drop of honey foreshadows a tsunami of problems.

The best fiction delivers to the reader, for the price of a book, a cultural Enigma machine. People are hungry to break the codes that shut them out. Readers of fiction set in Thailand, Laos, Gaza or Istanbul want a Bletchley Park expert to help them break the secret code. They want to know what the communications between people in those cultures mean, what are their true intentions and motivations.

The main thing about the original Enigma project was that it had to be kept under wraps. As soon as the Germans discovered the English had figured out what the enemy was saying, the shroud of secrecy would have been eliminated. Readers love mysteries and discovering the elements that comprise a mystery. It’s not so much secret information but complex, buried information that is accessible only with considerable time, patience and effort. When you scale up to universal constructs of the human condition from these starting points, you start to appreciate an irreducible complexity—a wall that stands between us and what we can know. I am trying to find, through my novels, a passageway through that wall. A place of escape.

Next time you are in the bookstore and gaze on the rows of books, think of fleets sailing under cover of darkness, targeting England. Or choose any target you wish. But once you’ve chosen the target of your interest and desires, look for the book that will guide you through the codes, a book written for those who want to know what, under the cover of a history, a culture and a language, can lift the fog masking intentions and motives.

What marks a writer who endures is the ability to communicate from behind the lines. That’s why intelligent people continue to read books. When the medium degenerates into the babble of surfaces, then such books add to the fog. But in the right hands they are the best Enigma machine ever invented.

That’s what I do and why I do it. Bangkok is my Bletchley Park.

Sir Frank Kermode and Shigeo Tokuda Scholar and Porn Star

I want to write about sex and about death. Since writing was invented it is hard to think of a writer who didn’t embrace these two states of the human condition. They jockey throughout life like two racecars fighting for pole position, and we go along for the ride, strapped into the passenger’s seat of both cars, pretending that we are at the wheel. We avoid thinking that sooner or later we are going to crash both cars. Our brains program us to believe that we are Formula A professional drivers. That individually our skill shapes, alters and controls our destiny. It’s a simple delusion that sitting in the back is the same as being at the wheel but it does pull us through the day (and night).

That’s the reality of life. Your two cars are going over the cliff and into the void. Sex is the one that usually stalls out and sputters to a stop first. Old age sputters, too, and sometimes needs a little push before gravity takes over. And if you look in the rearview mirror, you’ll see a long line of cars right on your bumper about to follow you into the void.

Why the gloom, Moore? What Celtic genes are switch-ing through your synapses that sends a chemical bath through your neuron system and comes out the other end as the ritual of a shotgun marriage between sex and death and a James Dean finality to all of it?

It started when Sir Frank Kermode died on Wednesday in Cambridge at the age of 90. He’d written over 50 books. He’d been knighted. He was a Shakespeare scholar, too. Sir Frank wasn’t a relative, a mentor, a friend or even someone I’d recognize passing on the street. His drive over the cliff of life has been noted in the literary blogs, that faint cluster of stars in the far reaches of the visible Net universe.

Sir Frank with 90 innings at the plate and 50 home runs was inducted into the Pantheon of those few who are nominated by the living as having accomplished a good life, left behind a body of work with his name attached, and contributed to our knowledge and understanding about literature. I think of Sir Frank as someone who represented the high road, what we call high culture. He is scheduled to go from life to myth and legend. That apparently is the best we can hope for when the nose of our car points due south and into the void.

So far I suspect a number of readers have been skimming this article impatiently wanting to know when do we get to Sex. That’s the leveler, the Pantheon of beings that gets our engines going. Either you do it, read or watch others doing it, talk about doing it, buy medicine that promises doing-it performance, shop for doing-it accessories, think or day dream about doing it, or have dreams in which you definitely out distancing Robocop in the doing-it department.

This brings me back to Sir Frank. We don’t think about old people having sex. Dying, yes. That’s what they’re supposed to do, get out of the way, make way for the young horny ones in our midst. Let’s take a short drive down the low road. Our driver is Shigeo Tokuda, who started his porno film career at 60 years old, and fifteen years later, hitting the 75-year mark, has 200 films under his belt (so to speak). Mr. Tokuda (no knighthood on the horizontal bamboo mat in his future) claims no need to swallow a Viagra before the cameras roll. His position (he assumes many in his films) is that getting and maintaining an impressive erection is purely psychological. Most of Mr. Tokuda’s co-stars are females who are around 30 years old. There is a whole genre of porno films labeled ‘elderporn’ where the age difference between the elderly male and his counterpart is best measured in light years. There is also a sub-genre of elderly women having sex with young men but apparently the market for such films is thin.

When Shigeo Tokuda follows Sir Frank over that cliff for his final take, he may not be remembered for his insights into Shakespeare but for his starring roles in such classics as Tit-Lover Old Man Kameichi and His Horny Pranks.

High road or low road, like blue pill or red pill, you have a choice in the road you take. Authors make that choice every time they start a book. Writing blends death and sex into myth, folktale, legend and serving up a strong brew turns us into addicts. We drink down to the last dregs such stories and ask for a refill. The reality is Sir Frank’s opus makes believe that lives devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom are the pinnacle of human existence and shows our true potential for opening our minds. But our dirty little secret is that we’d trade places playing Shigeo Tokuda’s understudy in our old age rather than parsing the meaning of Hamlet into a book-sized essay. In our heart of hearts, something tells us that while we can never aspire to the likes of Sir Frank, we have a fighting chance to follow Shigeo Tokuda’s example to the final moment when the lights are cut and the stage goes dark.

I could leave Sir Frank and Shigeo at this point. But that would do both of them a disservice. There is something not quite right in the mash up of two very different lives that should stop us from snickering into our hand. This is where SLIM comes into the picture.

SLIM, which is short-hand for Small, Limited and Impermanent, describes the outer ring dimensions of a single human life. It doesn’t matter whether you’re aiming to be Sir Frank or Mr. Tokuda, SLIM is what all of us are stuck with, including you. We have a sense in a celebrity driven world that some lives appear to be inflated, expanded beyond the normal, and indeed in a real sense these lives give the impression of a SLIM violation.

But there can be no such violation. The human condition is the same for everyone. No one is an exception—no one is immune to SLIM as it is the fundamental rule that defines our existence.

There is another point about the high and low roads. The guardrails and yellow line down the center come from morality, laws and ethics. We are taught from an early age to follow these rules of the road. But we love our outlaws and our porno stories nonetheless.

The best writers sculpt stories populated with characters who promise to have found a trap door and chance of escape from SLIM. In reality fiction, such a conceit usually is the character’s undoing. In fantasy and science fiction, the elements are bent, twisted, and the way out is something that looks vaguely like the human condition but is post-SLIM, like the promise of post-human singularity life. The digital world promises a kind of abstract immortality that is impossible in our analog biology. In the digital universe you are converted into a kind of ‘fingerprint’ in a book where we keep track of whose existences are worthy of remembrance.

Books and films and music—the arts—offer readers a chance to transcend their human condition, sweep aside the SLIM, and substitute a human condition that is much larger, borderless and permanent. The journey to find such alternatives is our tragedy. Noir is the world where the characters will never stand a chance at such transcendence, a world where all the guardrails and center lines are an illusion, the headlights are switched off, and the characters drive blind. In the noir world, at each step, the reader understands the utter futility of fighting SLIM. Shigeo Tokuda will one day need to pop a Viagra, and later on the day will come when even Viagra won’t do the trick. Laughter will rain down from the rest of us when that happens, as we secretly believe that unlike Shigeo we will be spared this humiliation as our young co-star lights a cigarette, wraps the sheet around her and winks into the camera.

Fifty books, 90 years old is an accomplishment; make no mistake about that. Sir Frank gave us our best shot at blowing a hole through SLIM. Bigger caliber rounds have bounced off the shell of SLIM before, and bigger rounds will be loaded and fired in the future. Why do we continue to believe the impossible can be achieved in a single life?

Because so much of life is in working out the daily stuff of existence, Sir Frank working over a draft of a book, Shigeo driving to the studio, brushing teeth, eating, checking email, taking a phone call, reading a newspaper, gossiping with a friend, helping out someone in the family or a neighbor. It doesn’t add up to much. It lacks weight and importance. It is so incredibly impermanent. We crave a life that tips the scales as having been heavy and strong and long.

As writers we undertake the tasks of finding the location of such weight and meaning among the rubble of day-to-day existence and attached these dispatches which makes life grander, more exciting, and purposeful. Unless you write noir, which puts your nose into SLIM and life asks you as the reader to keep on breathing.

Like bends in the road, a story—noir or otherwise—demarks a path, and characters need a good reason to go down that path, equipped with the skills to negotiate the twists and turns, and dealing with the troubles along the way. The destination is, as they say, not the reason to travel; it is the journey and what happens along the way that defines us.

The Making of a Villain

Having finished the twelfth novel in the Vincent Calvino series, 9 Gold Bullets, I have been reflecting over the course of this series, how I have developed not only the character of the private eye but the villains who seep into each story. The contemplation has caused me to reflect on how a novelist goes about selecting, describing and using villains.

A villain can be a cardboard cutout, a cipher whose purpose is to wear the mask of evil. This kind of villain we know very little about except for his badness. The villain has habits, traits, morals and beliefs we hate. We rarely have mixed feelings when such a person dies. We’re actually cheering his demise. Such a character, though common in many books, appeals to a basic blood instinct for violence and revenge. Books like this sell very well. That alone tells you all you need to know about the reflective qualities of many people. They don’t want a deep understanding of the bad guy’s world, a world where he is often an ordinary, good guy. They don’t want confusion or ambiguity. They want the villain to wear a black hat and want to cheer when he takes a bullet in the heart.

Governments know this psychological need better than writers. It brings in votes. There is a formula to brew up a villain.

It comes from understanding how the world around us creates a villain. First, you start with a decision as to whether the villain operates in a private or public sphere. Most crime fiction is about villains in the private sphere. A public sphere villain is the product of a mass-market creation, one intended to appeal across gender, class and ethnic lines. Villains bring people together. The political establishment, like a good crime novelist, knows all of the techniques needed to demonize those it fears, those who question or usurp its right to power. In private, we do much the same but with a huge difference; those at the top of the political establishment everywhere have and exercise real power. They can use that power to turn dissenters into dime store villains. No novelist, no matter how popular, could ever hope to compete with the full force of the state channeled through the media.

Some villains are more difficult to manufacture. It all depends on the raw material.

If you want to create a villain among those who look, act, walk and talk like you, then you need to go full guns blazing to make that person someone outside the scope of society’s protection—someone who is evil, wicked, threatening; someone whose very presence raises fear and loathing. You need a way to turn friends into foes and make them evil demons whose lives, when taken, are used to reduce the level of anxiety by the authorities.

This is how the hierarchy protects and nurtures its own. People share an identity, and part of that identity is the perch to which a person is assigned. Not everyone is happy with their perch assignment. From the point of view of many governments, a villain is someone who questions the legitimacy of the hierarchy by screaming that unfairness abounds in who occupies which perch. Even the most liberal of people raised to defend and support the hierarchy find themselves willing to restrict freedom of speech when that speech raises unconformable questions about the fairness, transparency and accountability of members at the top. This translates as: If you have a high perch, you will fight like hell to keep it.

Foreigners are much easier to usher into the villain corner. That’s why they are popular villains in fiction, too. Such individuals don’t share our identity. They look, dress, think and talk differently. They aren’t real people; they are walking stereotypes of what we are taught about such people. The bottom line is that foreigners are outsiders. Those on the outside should not expect entitlement to the same rights and benefits as even the mostly lowly members of the hierarchy. In Arizona the state legislature passed a law that allows the police to stop and demand papers proving nationality. Some have said the law is a coded way to repress illegal Mexicans in that state. Arizona sits on the U.S.–Mexican border and has a large Mexican population. Arizona politicians have used fear and suspicion and loathing as a basis for creating new police powers to separate citizens from that other—the non-citizen.

That is an example of the true face of power arrangements. It is an ugly face. The tribe gathers emotional resources and funnels the rage and blame at foreigners. Repressive measures like the Arizona law are a common response when the hierarchy feels an existential threaten from within. In such times the official measures fall heavily on those who resist government repression. They become vilified by power holders, and once that message is officially sanctioned, a class of people becomes demonized and further marginalized. The worst of it, though, always falls on those who are the target of such repression. As foreigners in Arizona, they have no countervailing political voice. The outsiders have no choice but to take the jackboot aimed at their midsection or to rebel. The predominant message of such societies is the same—foreigners are told to accept their outsider status; they have no protection, no rights; and mostly, they have no choice or freedom.

Governments, I contend, do a much better job than novelists at creating mass audiences for villains. They get a lot of practice. It is a way of life for them. To make a bestseller on the New York Times best-seller list often means the writer has found a trapdoor and tapped into the public villain-making enterprise.

What I have described is one explanation as to why villains, ones manufactured by the state, often turn out to be antiheroes. We root for the person unfairly and arbitrarily singled out for a different kind of treatment from those around him or her. In such a struggle those exercising the repressive instrumentalities of the state are the villains.

In writing a crime novel, there is usually a villain. The hero is challenged in dealing with his adversaries’ skill, cunning and resources. The suspense is whether the hero is able to overcome a committed and determined opponent.

Readers of fiction decide by the books they buy what kinds of villains and heroes they demand, and what the relationships in such confrontations lead to. It is their dance of life and death readers seek to follow, but first they must believe that the hero stands for something worthy, noble, a matter of principle and honor. That is the promise of good over bad, or right over wrong. As a reader you instinctively form a bond with a character who shares your views about what is the right thing to do. Once that decision is made, who is a hero and who is a villain fall easily into place. Very few can see the good and bad on both sides of the barricades.

In reality, though, I suspect many people pick their fiction as they pick their political leaders or candidates: they want a black-and-white confrontation. Years of indoctrination within every culture ensure a degree of uniformity in the perception of who is a hero and who is a villain. The political structure has a huge vested interest in controlling the image of both. Official controls such as censorship and restrictive legislation, like the Arizona immigration law, are attempts to keep the purity of a myth from being tarnished, even though the reality suggests this is futile.

There is another point worth noting. The greatest fear of authorities is the spread of discontent as people begin to question and criticize the fairness of the political structure. The classic response to this situation is for the government to demonize individuals who express this dissatisfaction and cast them out in the category of non-human or non-us. As a rule of thumb, the louder the drumming of the propaganda organs to vilify opponents, the likelier this signal is a precursor to slaughter.

Studies have shown that in modern war, the number of soldiers willing to shoot and kill enemy combatants is very small. The overwhelming majority of soldiers historically haven’t shot to kill; they have shot over the heads of their enemies. And these enemies were outsiders, foreigners, those outside the scope of protection. Think how much harder it is for soldiers to kill another citizen. To do so, those doing the killing must be told and must believe the people they are killing are demons. It doesn’t much matter whether they are called communists or terrorists or traitors; the effect is the same. They are outside the circle of the community to which humanity, justice and empathy are extended.

The Language Barrier: The March of Time

The obstacle often hidden when you read a book set in another country and culture is the native language used in that place. It is not an insignificant issue. Marina Gorbis recently questioned the ability of English translations to convey the cultural freight of the original Russian, observing:

One of the best things about speaking Russian (possibly the only thing), is that it gives you an ability to access Russian literature in the original. Over the years I’ve tried many different translations of Russian writers and was disappointed every time. Nothing compares to the original. Maybe it is impossible to do justice to these texts because many Russian words are so deeply rooted in a uniquely Russian context and life circumstances.

A similar position can be put forward for the Thai language. The bulk of my fiction has been set in Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. For a non-native speaker, the daily work of researching a book set in Thailand presents a constant challenge. As the author, I am in the position of translating a Thai’s vision of reality into English. This often requires close observation of matters that most of us take for granted.

For example, take the concept of time. Einstein introduced the notion that time is relative. We understand, however, this is a specialized, scientific concept that has little to do with day-to-day life. And unless we are writing science fiction, most of us would have a reasonably similar understanding of what time means, how it passes and how we separate the past, present and future.

In the Thai language, there are some time-challenging concepts that often frustrate the outsider. Three phrases from Thai demonstrate a built-in vagueness that is characteristic of the language.

The phrase "kamlang ja," which precedes a verb—for example, kamlang ja pai (about to leave), kamlang ja thueng (about to arrive) or kamlang ja set (about to finish)—is wonderfully flexible and open-ended. It avoids specifying any particular time as to when someone will actually show up for an appointment, finish a task or make up their mind. When you are expecting guests for dinner and they phone to say they are running late, they will likely say they are "kamlang ja thueng." That can translate into anything from a few minutes to a couple of hours.

The second phrase, muea kon, is used in talking about something that happened in the past. It might be a personal event like riding a water buffalo through rice fields as a kid or it might refer to an eighteenth-century battle with the Burmese. It could be a couple of years or many centuries all bundled into the same phrase. When you hear a Thai talk about muea kon, as a Westerner, who is time measurement precise, it will take some practice to listen to the context of what is being said and then to draw from that background whether the speaker is talking about the last ice age or a motorcycle accident a couple of years ago.

The perception of time in Thailand is also influenced by Buddhist concepts connected with karma. Chat kon, or last life, has accumulated enough merit to enter this existence and explains the status and prospects of each individual. Though in a far more materialistic world, only those who have experienced a string of bad luck would think about some sin from a prior life as the reason for getting caught with the hand in the cookie jar and carted off to prison. Chat nee is the present life where wrong and good actions and thoughts accumulate on opposite sides of the cosmic accounting book. As a practical matter we are all in the kamlang ja stage of dying and waiting for rebirth in chat naa, or next life—except for the rare person who achieves enlightenment and breaks the cycle of rebirth. 

A reality check when reading fiction set in another culture is to ask whether the author has an understanding of how the people educated in that culture view time or whether the author simply imposed his or her cultural time baggage on that culture. Every novel moves its characters through time. The best novels, though, take the reader into the characters’ way of calculating time as that has a consequence in their social networks and sets up the expectation of when something will take place. To do that, the author has to understand how characters in the culture look at clocks and calendars. Einstein’s theory of relativity is alive and well inside the literary world where narratives take place in exotic places.

Constructing Reality: What We Pay Attention to

In writing a series set in Thailand, I am mindful that Thais and foreigners have not just a different perspective, but a different paradigm when it comes to constructing their reality. Richard Nisbett has done research into the holistic way in which East Asians look at the world around them. Some years ago, I reviewed Nisbett’s book titled The Geography of Thought, How Asians and Westerners Think Differently… and Why (2003).

How did such a different way of perceiving the world come about? Professor Nisbett’s thesis is that, in the West, we are all children of ancient Greece, where a strong sense of individual liberty, freedom and free will developed. In China, in place of the idea of each person being in charge of his or her own life and free to act accordingly, the Chinese have valued harmony, friends and family. While the Greeks engaged in debate to discover the truth, the Chinese have been less interested in the discovery of truth through debate than preserving a harmonious interdependent social life.

Nisbett’s theme was also picked up by Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. Gallagher mentions Nisbett’s metaphor based on a camera lens. In the West we use something like a zoom lens to get a close-up of the environment; in the East people use a wide-angle lens.

This sounds interesting but very academic. Here’s an illustration that helps bring it into focus (no pun intended). Imagine a picture of cartoon figures in a decidedly hostile looking crowd. One face is smiling. Asked to reply whether the smiling figure is angry or happy, a Westerner will likely reply that he looks happy. An Asian, however, will look at the face in the context of the overall crowd and say maybe he’s happy but maybe not because those around him aren’t happy.

In the West we filter out the social context; in Asia, the social context is the most important overall clue to reading what the scene is about. Of course this distinction doesn’t just apply to faces; it also is implicit when considering principles of social justice or equality.

For example, given an allegation of corruption made by someone from the United States against another American, most Westerners would focus on the evidence that supports the charge. A logical, analytical examination of all the facts would be assumed to be the best way to handle the case and to guarantee fairness in the final verdict.

In Asia, evaluation of a charge of corruption by a citizen against an official or a cop would not necessarily follow the same route. The first question would be, what did the person laying the charge have against the official or the official’s family or friends? The social context of the people involved, the person making the charge and the person who was subject to the context, would be evaluated. Did the person making the allegation bear a personal grudge over some personal or business matter?

The idea of laying the charge purely as a matter of ethics or principle would not be believed by most Asians. It would be perceived as a smokescreen behind which there was another agenda. As much time would be spent trying to determine that agenda, the relationships involved, the consequences for those relationships and the potential to cause a problem with overall stability. It is not that the facts of the particular case would be irrelevant in an Asian context; it is more that the facts are simply another part of the context which needs to be addressed.

The basis of what Asians pay attention to can be traced back to Confucius, who believed that there was truth on both sides, so deciding one side to be the winner and the other the loser, based on a finding on a single truth, was pointless. In the West, the search for truth has a consensus as the right mission for government and the courts. Nothing should stand in the path of identifying the truth. Of course there are cover-ups and lies and more lies in the West. But those covering up and lying don’t argue that truth is pointless. They argue another version of truth as the premium brand.

In Asia, it would be wrong to say that Asians are uninterested in the truth; they are very much interested. But they see a larger issue of how truth can create enemies by designating someone a loser. In a face-based culture, declaring one person a winner and another a loser can have lasting implications not just for the loser but for his family, clan, neighbors, classmates and friends.

In the Vincent Calvino novels I work these issues into the narrative. Colonel Pratt, Calvino’s protector and friend, understands the larger social context in which crime and other antisocial acts occur. Calvino, a product of the West, is more focused on getting the facts, the truth, out in the open and lets the chips fall where they may. Pratt, on the other hand, understands that in Asia the chips may be like a chunk of concrete that can fall on a police officer’s or a private investigator’s head.

One of the points Nisbett raises is his view of the characteristic lack of curiosity of the Chinese. In his experience they had little interest in the views or stories told by foreigners. In his view this absence of curiosity resulted in Easterners developing a strong loyalty to the inside group of friends and family and dismissing or distancing themselves from those perceived to be on the outside.

In the West we encourage curiosity and value this attri-bute as an essential part of the creative process. In Asia, there seem to be, on the surface of day-to-day life, more secrets; more of the unspoken, the glance, the raised eyebrow. There is an unwillingness to be boxed in by making a firm decision or looking deeply into alternative ways of thinking about a problem or situation.

Curiosity is about how we focus. It can take us out of the social context. It can be a mashup of multiple pos-sibilities. That leads to the possibility of instability. That is why curiosity is a dangerous thing. The curious person is changing the lens, looking through the zoom, the wide-angle, the close-up, and filtering each shot for some element missing in the earlier frame. When it comes to writing a book, one with characters from the East and the West, I find it important to remember that the perspective of each person is shaped by his or her culture and language. People have social constructs from which they draw their conclusions and take their stands, and which cause emotions like anger and hatred. Without an awareness of what shapes those constructs and, once shaped, how they operate in practice, we substitute our own constructs and project them onto others. There is the cause of misunderstanding. The cause of a narrative in a work of fiction failing. The cause of armed conflict and terrorism.

Marketing God and the Hell Problem

Maketing brands. Giveaways. These are the sacred pathways to converting a person to a new religion. Thailand is largely a Buddhist country. The usual figure is ninety percent of Thais would tick the box labeled Buddhism if asked to choose their religion. You need to mix in animism, Brahmanism and capitalism to get a full understanding of the religious landscape.

Enter Jesus. Not exactly Jesus but those seeking believers in Jesus as a savior. The one who saves lost souls. But before I go there ...

Marketing largely depends on opportunity. You need a captive audience. That is why network TV has served a couple of generations of all kinds of businesses flogging all kinds of mainly useless objects, beliefs and services.

The TV market in Thailand is large. But as far as I know, none of the Christian sects have coughed up the money to run ads. They are, however, not without options.

Traffic jams. If you truly wish to experience the full rush of toxic fumes pouring out of the back of a city bus like an exploded dome at Chernobyl, the place to go is the massive intersection at Lad Phrao and Rachadapisek around 6:00 p.m. Traffic stretches to the next time zone. The intersection looks like a parking lot. Locked inside in their vehicles, the drivers are going nowhere soon. They’re stuck. Upset. Bored. Wondering who is going to win the battle between their full bladder and growling stomach. Enter the missionaries with the standard speakers used by politicians of all stripes. They have their people carrying signs with a speaker above the stick, and they are giving sermons to the people locked in their cars, crammed inside buses or sucking the foul air on idling motorbikes. The stick is a modified cross. You need to look hard to find the cross bow at the top just below the boom box speaker.

The Christians run this gambit like a military operation. They’ve covered all four corners. They have speakers spaced so that when by some miracle a car does move up twenty meters, the next positioned speaker prevents any drop out of the message. So far full points to the missionaries. It must have been through all that early experience with lions that they learned a thing or two about positioning.

The problem is the message. There’s probably not a population anywhere in the world more open to a spiel about a spirit, a god, a demon, fairies—you name it. If it is supernatural, you have captured the attention of an overwhelming number of locals. So why in God’s name have fifty years of Christians preaching not made a dent in the ninety percent of the population who tick the Buddhism box?

It’s the message. They need to work on the message. What are the trapped motorists, who are miserable enough, hearing over those speakers? That man is an evil bugger, born in sin, and unless they repent, then it’s an eternal appointment with some horned devil setting their hair on fire with a flamethrower. Thais like fun. They love ghost stories and offer cups of water and plates of rice to the spirit of the land daily. But none of the local supernatural figures threaten such a heavy punishment for having a little fun. But it’s not only about the fun. It’s getting a church official to give them winning lottery numbers and read their fortunes. Jesus saves. But he’s not good with lotto numbers or telling the faithful supporter, based on a reading of the palm of her hand, whether the man who works at the next desk will ask her to marry him.

As they hear the speakers blaring for their souls and urging them to confess their sins, the Thais realize another couple of minor points. Like making a confession. Isn’t that what the police beat out of you? It’s not a sellable concept ever since Guantanamo figured large in the local news. Merit making, on the other hand, immediately creates the image of Girl Scout cookies, milk or making a fire without using matches. Given a choice between confession and merit making, I don’t know about you, but thinking you can beat the rap of all that fun by setting loose a bunch of sparrows or turtles is close to holding a straight flush. If you’re a poker player, you’d probably raise the table on that hand.

There’s one more thing about confessions that doesn’t wash in Thailand. If you admit that you screwed up, then you’ll likely lose face. Losing face can make the confessor do all kinds of violent things to the person extracting that confession. Like murder. The trail of mortal sin in these parts often starts with someone tricked into making a confession. Basically you’d have to either trick or beat people to get them to confess. No one’s going to risk loss of face just on a promise to get to heaven. Needless to say, confession is a risky business.

So that’s the deal: repent all the fun you’ve ever had and plan to have in the future—throw away that winning poker hand—and commit to a life of basically hanging around without any hope of ever having a holy one whisper a winning lottery number as you wait for your ticket to heaven. Avoiding sin. The problem is that a lot of those sins involve a lot of fun. Of course in Buddhism you can have too much fun, too. But the worst prospect that a Buddhist faces is that of being reborn as a cockroach or a frog, but sooner