Living the noir life in Bangkok

Asia Hand, the second novel in your Vincent Calvino private eye series, was awarded the prestigious 2011 Shamus Award in the Best Paperback Original category. How does it feel to win the award? And why do you think the judges singled out this particular book when there are 12 in the series?

Winning a major award is always a good thing. Until you realize that awards are basically a crapshoot. Some books are left out, others ignored, depending on the blood sugar level of the judges when they read your book, a chance remark, something someone liked or hated about you from the Internet.

In any highly competitive artistic field like crime fiction, people certainly love awards – publisher, agents, publicists. It helps them sell books. Asia Hand was the second book in the Vincent Calvino series and originally came out in Thailand in 1993. But the American edition published by Grove/Atlantic came out in 2010. The Shamus Award works like most literary awards, which are set up to honour books published in the previous calendar year. The 2011 Shamus Award was for private eye fiction published in the United States in 2010. The judges weren’t at liberty to choose from the 12 books in the series.

How many books have you written – all based in Thailand?

I’ve finished my 23rd novel titled The Wisdom of Beer, a crime caper set in Pattaya, which will come out this month for the Thailand market. Most of my novels are set in Thailand. But around half a dozen are set elsewhere such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, Burma, South Africa, England, Canada, and New York. I know that’s more than half a dozen places but a couple of the novels are set in more than one country. I’ve also written non-fiction: Heart Talk, The Cultural Detective, The Vincent Calvino Reader’s Guide. The non-fiction is Thailand connected. This year another collection of my essays will be published under the title: Faking it in Bangkok, a collection of about 40 plus essays about life in Bangkok, writing crime fiction, law enforcement and criminal justice systems.

Do you ever suffer from writer’s block? If so, what do you do to get over it?

If there were a pill to take to have writer’s block, I’d buy a bottle. I’d probably become a junkie. Not being ever able to turn it off has to be worse than not being able to turn it on.

Have you always enjoyed writing?

I am not certain ‘enjoyed’ is exactly the word I use to describe my relationship with the written word. Writing for me is more of a process, like an Iron Man contest, where you run 10K, then swim 5K, bicycle 20K, and hop on one foot for the last 500 meters to cross a finish line. You fall over the finish line exhausted and count your arms and legs to make sure everything is still attached.

And there is always some critic who pipes up that your form at kilometer 4 marker of the swimming part of the race was really not impressive, and how he was really surprised you didn’t drown. So next time you try to remember at the kilometer 4 marker to make certain you really show them how you can swim. No sooner do you catch your breath, and then someone fires a starter pistol and you start all over again. And by the time you hit that swimming part again, you are just struggling the best you can, and think maybe the critic is right - it’s just better to give up and drown.

Who were/are your favourite novelists and books?

Most writers give a load of revisionist crap when asked this question. They want all the great writers whom everyone admires but almost no one reads to be their inspiration. If you name living writers, you need to name 20 or you’d have all sorts of people who feel snubbed and they will lie awake at night trying to figure a way to get revenge.

I usually have four or five books going at one time. At the moment, here’s my reading: Bone and Cutter by Newton Thornburg, a brilliant crime novel (the author’s dead by the way), Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, John J. Mearsheirmer’s Why Leaders Lie, Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, and Frans De Waal’s The Age of Empathy.

Where do you get the inspiration for your novels? Is Bangkok the sort of place that fires the imagination?

Bangkok is a mental scape of sensory and intellectual overload, filled with gossip and stories of glory, intrigue, superstition, feuds, disappearances, hidden forces, third-hands - and that’s just the people sitting around the bar at the FCCT on a given Friday night.

It isn’t a question of finding inspiration, but choosing from an endless buffet of incredibly interesting material that stretches into infinity; this is working in an environment straight out of Borges’ Library of Babel. Or from Jose Saramago’s Blindness. Or inside Roberto Balano’s novel 2066. These Latin American authors shine a flashlight down a path that leads a fictional way to deal with such strangeness, beauty and horror and make it accessible to the rest of us.

Bangkok attracts all kinds of characters to its fly paper of the weird, surreal, scary, unexplainable, unknowable, and sensual. Pick up any copy of The Bangkok Post, The Nation or better yet Thai Rath or Daily News and there’s material for a dozen books and movies every week. In the short story collection I recently edited titled Bangkok Noir I brought together 12 of the best known authors to write about Bangkok. If you want a good guide to the dark side of Bangkok, read Bangkok Noir. And half the money from the book goes to educate the kids of migrant workers in Thailand.

When did you first come to Bangkok and what made you decide to stay?

I first wandered into Bangkok in 1983 and returned at the end of 1988 to write a novel. That’s when I fell into something like Borges’ Library of Babel and have never been able to find my way out. I stayed because I am held hostage by my imagination, which feeds on the interaction between the various communities inside Bangkok. Foreigners and Thais living, working, playing and dying side by side.

It is the nuance within the foreign community: each nationality clumps together but they also overlap in many different locations. The same can be said about the Thais who are diverse in background, education and outlook. The goal is to get below the surface, emotionally and intellectually, and show the way people deal with each other. How the power flows through these communities. I stayed to try and figure out something about myself from the cracked mirror in the creepy corridor of the old Thermae coffee shop (see next question), a little more about the human condition so I can have a better idea if there is any real meaning in the world. I am still working on it.

It has been long rumoured that, in your early days in Bangkok, you spent countless nights at the infamous Thermae coffee shop to study the sort of people who would appear later in your novels?

I never tried to count the number of nights I spent at the old Thermae. There would have been a ‘count’ but it would be ‘countless.’ For a few years I was a frequent visitor to the old establishment. It is said the past is a foreign land. Those days in Bangkok are quite foreign to most people now. They’ve forgotten about the time 20 years ago when we had no Internet, cable TV, cell phones, or high-speed computers.

The nightlife was far less developed than today. The expat population smaller, more closely knit. Most of the people who flitted in and out of the Thermae in those days didn’t stick around long enough to be studied. The place had a noir, an unlit, dangerous back alley entrance. You entered through the restrooms, and the first thing you saw was a cracked mirror over a dirty sink. You could study the way people looked at themselves in that cracked mirror, as if to say, “Is that really me?”

It’s also said that some expats here have indeed recognized themselves, or people they know, in your books?

One of the highest honors an author can experience is to have others believe that they recognize themselves or their friends in one of his or her books. I could fill a small stadium with people who, over the years, claim either to be a character in one of my books or know someone who was used as a character.

It reminds me of the old comic routine, “I am unique just like everyone else.” If an author can create the illusion of uniqueness so that each of the readers believes that he or she alone possesses exactly the same insights or qualities of a character, looks the same, acts the same, dresses the same, then he or she will have written a successful book.

True story. Years ago when the old Thermae was still in business (pre-1996) a stranger asked if he could sit at my table. “No problem.” For the next twenty minutes he explained how he was a character in a book. “What book?” He nodded, “A Killing Smile.” “That’s something,” I said. He told me he knew the author, too. About then an old journalist friend from the Bangkok Post sat down at the table. A couple of minutes passed before the stranger found out I’d written A Killing Smile. Loss of face on a scale I’ve not seen since. The stranger left.

But to answer your question, yes, every single character in every single book I’ve written is based on an actual real life
person. (In the next question below I explain the dreadful influence of alien ideas like imagination and creativity on writers and how this needs to be exposed for the fraudulent illusion it creates around writers.)

Have you ever had any adventures of your own similar to those of Vincent Calvino?

Here’s how it works. Every last one of Calvino’s adventures I have personally experienced, and in exactly the same way that I describe them in the Calvino novels. I think that imagination is highly overrated and basically the resort of the lazy and fearful who are afraid to leave the safety of their computer and room.

I can assure you that my limited imagination could never have conceived of half of the stuff that happens to Calvino.
Imagination is a big, fat myth. The only thing worse than imagination is the fraud of creativity. Something either happened or it didn’t. Am I right? Don’t beat around the bush pretending like there’s a Tooth Fairy. We’re grownups so don’t try that
“pretend it happened” business with me. Of course everything that will happen to Calvino in the future, will happen to me first. I immediately write it down as it is happening (this does take some skill as people can see your scribbling at the most awkward moments), revise it (keeping it absolutely truthful), and find the right place in the story to paste it. Or if I can’t find the right place, just stick the experience in randomly. At that moment, I can completely forget it ever happened to me and pretend to myself and everyone else it only happened to Calvino.

When you’re not busy writing, how do you like to spend your free time?

Experiencing Vincent Calvino’s next great adventure.

Find out more about Christopher and his books at: www.cgmoore.com