Vincent Calvino’s World (A Noir Guide to Southeast Asia)

INTRODUCTION

There are two types of people, Vincent Calvino muses somewhere: those who want to know and those who don’t want to know. As a detective, Calvino is in the business of wanting to know, and his readers want to know what Calvino and his creator, Christopher G. Moore, have found out about Bangkok, Thailand and Southeast Asia. In Vincent Calvino’s World: A Noir Guide to Southeast Asia, Chad Evans tries to pull this knowledge together in one place, to find out where it comes from and to see how it has been reconstructed as art. What we face in Thailand, as Moore often points out, is a culture that wants to burnish its glittering surface but not to encourage people to dig too far beneath the image, to reveal the secrets that are being kept and have been kept buried. As the cultural edict goes, Be happy. Don’t think too much. The desire for truth and knowledge can lead to misery and mental torture, to chaos and the destruction of social relationships and order. Is it really worth it? Knowledge is dangerous. In what is the West’s first detective story, Oedipus the King, Oedipus’ heroic quest for knowledge, his I must know, leads to the revelation of himself to himself as a mother-marrying father-killer. Any quest for knowledge, whether by a society or an individual, always has the potential to reveal similar horrors.

Of course, publicly Thailand aspires to the image of a modern knowledge-based society, and in its educational and political edicts we can find all sorts of exhortations to citizens to acquire knowledge that is useful for the development of society and lip service to the idea that Thailand should be an open society where free expression and tolerance of diverse opinions and ideologies underpins the search for knowledge. But these run up against contradictory edicts about the greater importance of respect for seniors, for teachers, for superiors, for institutions such as the military and the monarchy, for religion and for traditional Thai values—for good people and good morality; in short for Thainess—a discourse which seems designed to forestall questioning and to resist definition.

The tension between those who seek knowledge and those who either actively keep it under wraps or who have been enculturated to not know those things that they are not supposed to know, who like May in God of Darkness (1998) are happy that [so] long as she does not see, she does not know, is at the heart of Moore’s work. Despite both Moore’s and his creation Vincent Calvino’s many years of experience in Thailand, their extensive and deep studies of Thai language, history, affairs and culture, neither has taken the road to Eastern mantras and mysticism. They are at heart men of the Enlightenment—the Western Enlightenment. I’m an investigator, not a shaman, says Calvino in Pattaya 24/7 (2004). They want to know what’s going on, and the Enlightenment’s central ethos is that in principle everything is knowable. But they have to take on board the multi-faceted expressions of the heart and mind in Thailand. Hard, patient work and study, the development of insight, openness to new experience and a certain amount of bravery, even foolhardiness, can allow us to get to the causes and effects that underlie everything. Calvino’s Laws are most often stated as logical propositions. If x, then y. Whether they deal with the trivial or profound, they are akin to scientific statements on cause and effect.

Of course, the ideals of the Enlightenment have been attacked in recent years by post-modernist theory, where grand narratives of progress and knowledge have been undermined by ideas of cultural relativism, where nothing is true and everything is true, where the supremacy of cause and effect has been wiped out by the inherent unpredictability of quantum particles, where the truth we see is always positional and conditional.

Post-modernism in its more intelligible forms has probably had the benign effect of diminishing Western arrogance and certainty and making us more aware that while truth may exist, it is fiendishly difficult to find, and that the chains of cause and effect are chaotically complicated. But that they are there and can be found, Moore insists on. In God of Darkness, set in the financial crisis of 1997, a young American has found himself enmeshed through his girlfriend May in the machinations of a wealthy Chinese-Thai family. He finds himself at a family dinner inexplicably seated next to the guest of honour, Frank Sinatra (a fake Frank Sinatra). Moore writes that events have causes: This is no accident; nothing the family did was ever an accident. Incompetent, ill-conceived, arrogant, stupid . . . but never accidental. A similar observation comes from Comfort Zone (1995), out of the mouth of a supremely intelligent Vietnamese beggar, Tan: [T]he universe is the only accident. Everything else has a reason, a cause, a purpose.

All of this is not to say that many Thais do not share Calvino’s or Moore’s desire to know. Some are outsiders in their own society and have escaped what Calvino in The Corruptionist (2010) calls brainwashing. Calvino’s best friend, Colonel Pratt, his vital connection to operating in Thailand and a collaborator in many of his cases, has his eyes half-opened. But there are still things he does not see because he knows he’s not supposed to know. Fon in Pattaya 24/7 refuses the official story of her husband’s supposed suicide and wants to find the real killer whatever the social and personal costs. In The Corruptionist some Thai people want to understand the buried truth of the War on Drugs murders and the political massacres of 1973, 1976 and 1992, which foreshadowed the events of 2010. There are many people with connections to Thailand today—both Thais and non-Thais—who want to know the truth behind these events and others, and they are in trouble because of it, sometimes in exile, sometimes in jail, sometimes in mourning, sometimes just in fear. Many, understandably, prefer the comfort of forgetting, a way of life in the land of insufficient evidence, as Moore writes in Pattaya 24/7.

Calvino is no superman. He gets to some sort of partial knowledge, but he too usually runs into the problem of insufficient evidence. He does what he can and what he has been asked to do. He has no program to save society. Who could expect more?

But many foreigners in Thailand are also in the camp of those not wanting to know. T.I.T.—This is Thailand. This familiar phrase is used by farangs as the brain-dead formulaic response to any instance of seeming Thai incompetence or stupidity on the one hand or to examples of unexpected Thai kindness, wisdom or fun-loving sanuk on the other. What the phrase perpetuates in modern form is the old myth of the inscrutable oriental, the notion that Asians are a fundamentally different kind of being from Westerners and that no amount of investigation and study can explain them. Those who have not read Moore may look at the covers of his books with their exotic Asian lovelies and expect that what will be dished up to them is just another orientalist sexual fantasy. And given that Calvino operates in the sexual playgrounds of Sukhumvit, Patpong and Pattaya, with their endless supply of young women looking for a generous hansum man, and in hi-so Bangkok, with its harems of minor wives and luxury gentlemen’s clubs for the rich and famous, the novels are not short of sexual titillation. But Moore rejects the orientalist myth. His purpose is to allow his readers to understand the motivations and formation of all of these people—the bargirls, the minor wives, the expats, the sexpats, the Thai elite and the underclasses—and to understand the various ways in which they seek both knowledge and illusion.

I am one of those readers. And one of those people. I came to Thailand in 2001 for a short-term teaching contract. My plan was to see that contract out, have some fun, recover from a mid-life crisis and a broken love affair and then head back to Australia to get back to normal life again. The contract ended and the job I thought I had lined up in Australia fell through, so I found a university teaching job and an apartment across the river from Khao San Road and the Grand Palace. I continued my occasional experiments in the pleasures and pitfalls of the playgrounds of Patpong and Sukhumvit and started playing tenor saxophone in a modestly popular soul/funk band that was performing in those very same playgrounds.

I was here. And I needed to find out more about the place I was living in.

The newspapers certainly weren’t telling me. They were written in a cryptic code where influential figures—corrupt or merely normal businessmen, generals and politicians—were often only referenced by the first letter of their name. A businessman whose name started with T and a general whose name started with S had bribed a politician whose name started with H. That was how the newspapers talked. The police advanced theories of suicide that seemed to involve ridiculously improbable levels of difficulty. Guilt in crimes seemed to be a matter that was proved by simply pointing a finger at the alleged culprit and the conveniently placed stash of drugs or corpse in front of him. The simmering rebellion in Thailand’s deep south led to the infamous Tak Bai massacre, where men were stacked like logs in trucks to be taken to an army base. Seventy or so died, and numerous others were wrecked for life. And no one was responsible. It’s forgotten.

Yet things seemed to work. Bangkok was not, on the surface, a particularly violent or crime-ridden place. Actually, a pretty friendly place. After a gig one night, I went for a bowl of noodles in the red light area of Sukhumvit 33 and walked off leaving a full wallet on the table. Somebody chased me for a hundred meters to return it. I couldn’t imagine that happening in any red light area anywhere else in the world. Another time, drunk, I got out of a cab leaving my sax on the back seat. The cab pulled away and left me in despair and self-loathing for my stupidity. Then it hit the next U-turn and screamed up to me to deliver my sax—worth several months’ wages to the average cabbie—into my loving arms. He refused a reward.

But it wasn’t all sweetness and light. During my first Songkran in Bangkok, I joined the revelry at Khao San Road. In a late-night bar that seemed to be full of police, I started to feel very woozy after drinking the cup of coffee I’d ordered to put a full stop to the night’s drinking. A girl—or was it a boy?—thought I needed help and ordered a taxi and took me home. I woke up in a daze. Checked for my wallet—gone. My watch—gone. My tin of loose change—gone. But I’d cleverly hidden twenty thousand baht under the bed. Gone, of course.

I went back to sleep for most of the next two days till the drug wore off. And then woke up feeling like Calvino on a bad day. Needing answers. Bangkok. Paradox, confusion, contradiction. Bewitching, haunting and killing smiles.

So it was that I found the novels of Christopher G. Moore. They offered me an understanding of Bangkok and Thailand that was nicely packaged in the culturally familiar idiom of the crime novel. In a recent article on novels by Christopher G. Moore and John Burdett, I wrote this explanation of the practical value of the expat crime novel:

In encounters with a foreign culture, it is useful to obtain the services of a go-between, a mediator, an interpreter. The tourist needs a map or tour guide. Novelists are go-betweens who guide their reader through the imagined reality of the novel and introduce them to a new world. In the detective novel in general, the detective himself is a mediator between the world of law and order and the world of crime and the detective reveals their locations relative to each other—sometimes distant, sometimes coterminous. In the Thai expat crime novel the detective and his novelist also serve as mediators between the world of Thainess and the world of his farang readers.

I’m sure that many of Moore’s readers are like me, seeking the help of his main detective, Vincent Calvino, to understand the place that has touched their lives and to understand its hidden histories and mysteries and characters. And not least of all to answer the question posed in the first sentence of The Big Weird (1996): In the name of God, why do you stay in Bangkok?

The great fictional detectives are deeply connected to the imagination and evocation of place—we think, for instance, of Maigret’s Paris, Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles, Dave Robicheaux’s gulf coast of Louisiana and Mario Conde’s Havana. Moore’s novels are steeped in this tradition of place. And apart from occasional forays to Pattaya, Phnom Penh, Saigon and Rangoon, Bangkok is Calvino’s place, and Moore has an uncannily predictive knowledge of it. Take this description from The Big Weird:

Bangkok, his city, the Big Weird, was a sprawl of thousands of half-empty square box-like whitish gray structures, high-rises belched out of bloated, chemically dulled egos as suspect as the money that lifted them upward to the sky of greed. A mind-numbing urban horizon of building cranes and building machines, giving birth to more and more boxes fashioned from concrete, steel and glass; home to ten million people, most of who appeared to occupy the roads for twenty hours a day. Going where? No one knew, no one cared.

This was written in 1996, just before the juggernaut crashed in the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The cranes stopped working, the workers left their tin shacks and went back to the villages where they could afford to eat while the corporations and millionaires juggled the money and tried to get out of the Ponzi scheme intact. The half-finished buildings survive today as ghost buildings, more grey than white. No one knew what was happening, no one cared. But almost twenty years on and the building frenzy has come back, and the horizon still looks pretty much like that description.

But the great fictional detectives do know where they’re going. And they care about what they’re doing. Despite the confusion, they all have some sort of centre. Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe takes a temporary break from the mean streets, his honour intact, to return to his rundown office with the bottle of Scotch in the desk drawer, Simenon’s Maigret sets aside his magical intuition for the comfort of his bourgeois home and his wife’s Sunday lunches, Padura’s Mario Conde goes back to his motley collection of old friends to drink cheap rum and listen to Led Zeppelin and the Beatles and complain about the world, and James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux goes back to his doomed wife and the illusory tranquility of his fishing tackle and bait store.

Like Marlowe, Vincent Calvino always retains a moral centre and returns with it intact. Calvino never charges so much for his services that he could be bought; he stays loyal to people like his friend and brother Colonel Pratt. Chandler’s classic description of the ideal, hard-boiled detective in his essay The Simple Art of Murder applies just as much to Calvino as it does to Marlowe. The reader may also imagine that it could apply to himself. This could be a description of just about everybody at one time or another—common, unusual, the best man and a good enough man, lonely and proud. The fictional private eye, writes Chandler. . .

must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. . . . He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.

So this book by Chad Evans is aptly and unsurprisingly called Vincent Calvino’s World. Calvino has that startling range of awareness that belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. In this introduction I’ve tried to recount my personal search for Calvino’s world, refracted by my own occasional participation in the noirish scene of Bangkok, but Evans details this world for a wider range of readers, people like Moore’s guy in Iowa City or man from Dusseldorf, who may occasionally dream of the pleasures of the Zone but might never get there, and people like Vincent’s Uncle Vito, who despite his Mafia connections in New York City shakes his head in disbelief when Vinny tells him how crime and punishment are organized in Bangkok. His work is also for Thais who are prepared to see their world from an outsider’s perspective. Calvino’s world is centred on Bangkok and Southeast Asia, but he is still an outsider, his character and values formed by New York City. His favourite drink is a Mekhong and Coke—lo-so Thai and all-American. His sense of place is radically different to that of most fictional detectives.

The subtitle of this book, A Noir Guide to Southeast Asia, tells us something too. This is a book dealing with the modern history of Southeast Asia over a span of nearly twenty-five years, the evolution of a character and the evolution of a writer’s work and ideas. Reading back through some of Moore’s work for this introduction, I was astonished how time and again snippets of what were then mere whispers and rumours have become solid fact. Moore was really looking closely at what was going on. In 2004, for example, two years before the coup of 2006, Moore wrote of the creep of what increasingly felt like a gradual slide into martial law. In 2010 and 2014, the creep stepped up to march tempo. He hinged his 2004 novel Pattaya 24/7 on the slave-like conditions that Khmers endured on Thai fishing boats, and today the Thai government is desperately trying to shine up its image in human trafficking to avoid international sanctions.

In Moore’s twenty-five years as a writer in and on Southeast Asia, he has moved out of his initial comfort zone of the farang ghettos of Bangkok and the interiorized psychology of his earliest novels into the social and political panoramas that we see in novels such as The Corruptionist. As with any writer who has developed such a large body of work, such a varied cast of characters, plots and situations, we can find the occasional false note, the occasional streak of sententiousness in the philosophizing, the occasional pulled punch—but writers in Thailand have to pull their punches sometimes to stay out of jail—and the occasional clunky plot contrivance.

But on the whole, as Chad Evans shows us, he is a writer of great precision, imagination, conviction and above all, knowledge. Evans’s book is at once a timely tribute to an important writer and to his most memorable character, a political and social history of Southeast Asia and a critique of the art of crime fiction. It will become an indispensable resource for Moore’s fans in particular but also for anyone who wants a deeper knowledge of Calvino’s world and Southeast Asia in these interesting times. It’s a compendium of knowledge, law, art, philosophy and history that may even help us to see the future more clearly.

Dr. Thomas Hoy

English Department

Thammasat University

Bangkok

August 2015

ONE

The Dreaming Detective

Vincent Calvino, the famous fictional Bangkok private investigator, first appears to the reader in his own nightmare in Christopher G. Moore’s 1992 novel Spirit House. Holstered with an unlicensed .38 police special, he is drinking in the D.O.A. Bangkok bar near midnight, agonising over his failure to uncover, over six months, the real cause of Jeff Logan’s demise by ‘heart attack’. The Thai bargirls, or working yings, all recognise ‘Winee’, even know him intimately, but evade his inquiries about Logan. One girl performs with an eel. Carnivorous caged bats await a midnight feed from their owner, barkeep Fast Eddy. A shrouded body lies atop the bar. Calvino is humiliated to discover the corpse is that of Logan, right beside him, in the crime scene. Eddy flashes a knife and feeds Logan’s ‘swollen member’ to the crazed bats. Calvino clutches his chest and hears the whores saying the drink’s working . . .

Calvino awakens that morning in his squalid, cold-water Bangkok flat to a gecko eating a roach and a bargirl he has ‘bought out’ for the night. She objects to the fact that he has kept her awake with his hard-core nightmare and has forgotten her name, Noi. Noi picks up his .38 and points it at his chest, her finger toying with the trigger guard. I hate Monday mornings, Calvino says, and then explains weakly to her that this is poot len—he is joking—and coughs up her name. Noi leaves, noting he has gone with so many lady in Thailand that to kill him would be a waste of time. In fact, later we find out he has known a hundred take-out ‘Nois’ before working the sexual coal face of the night as a detective, not a consumer.

The bug-eyed novice reader, five pages into Spirit House, draws breath when Calvino’s part-time maid, Mrs. Jamthong, respectfully and with an admonishing smile summons him out of his bedroom with, Khun Winee, breakfast is ready now. Hungover, he then discovers in the Bangkok Post a photo of the dead body of a bar friend, one Ben Hoadly, shot through the head, with the alleged killer, a ‘thinner addict’ (addicted to paint thinner), being paraded before the press by the police. Ratana, Calvino’s secretary, then phones him with the news that Hoadly’s father in England wants his son’s death investigated. All is never what it seems in Bangkok, and Vinny is back to work.

So, only a few pages into the first book of the Calvino series, we are confronted by three factors which make this hard-drinking, smart-ass P.I. different from all fictional American private eyes who came before him. First, it is 1992, and this detective is grafted onto a sexually bizarre subculture of international expats and Southeast Asian bars, a world with unique behavioural and transactional rules. Second, he has a subconscious mind, he dreams, giving him a dimension unseen before in the American crime detective genre. A shrink would enjoy Calvino, even Freud, but as we see later in Spirit House, all he gets is a creepy Thai fortune teller. Third, it seems not only do dreams and reality converge in Bangkok, but reality is stranger than dreams, in particular the realities of sex and murder as they pertain to resident foreigners, known as farangs. This Bangkok, with its ‘Big Weird’ factor of the convergence of spirits and ghosts with farang bodies and death, is readily recognised by any reader who has resided in Thailand for longer than a packaged stay.

For those unpackaged travellers who have indulged in and exploited Thailand’s sensual offerings (Gunter back in Deutschland, Jack back in Kansas), following Calvino is a way back to where they would rather be, back on Soi Cowboy headed for the next go-go bar. These former patrons read a Calvino novel with an empathy that extends to their missing sex life, something they won’t get from, say, reading a Nordic crime novel or a macho American detective novel, or watching TV food porn. Calvino is culturally unique within the genre partly because of his casual indulgence in the sex on offer in Bangkok, consumer sex for its own sake at times, but he is not aloof from having complex emotional attachments, particularly with expat girlfriends like Kiko, who turns up in Spirit House.

Calvino is an American private eye who serves as a guide through Bangkok’s back sois, and in tow we join his resident farang subculture in Thailand with its unique lingo, rules of sexual engagement and intrigues. We go AWOL in a netherworld heaven for alien expats and male misfits who coexist with a vast Thai subculture of outcast peasant yings and gender-bender ‘ladyboy’ katoeys (cut and uncut) who have escaped the rice farms for the Big Weird armed with stilettos, G-strings and bikini tops.

Who is Vincent Calvino?

Generally speaking, crime readers picking up a new private eye novel featuring a detective they have not encountered before have certain character expectations. The detective crime novel in the American tradition features either laconic 1920s-style hard-boiled dicks (like those of Dashiell Hammett or Erle Stanley Gardner)