I have no attachments.
Next life I will make a perfect Buddhist. But in this
life I am paying off the karma of a last life. I am an
ex-lawyer from New York City. No one gets himself born
in New York City without having made some major mistake
in the last life. Whatever that mistake was it was bad
enough to cause me to abandon New York City for Bangkok.
Flipped from the wok straight into the fire. For the past
dozen years, I've been solving crimes in Southeast Asia,
keeping and trying not to get burnt.
Bangkok. City of Angels.
Only most of the halos are tarnished. Their wings are
often clipped.
I
have been known to take cases just about anywhere in Southeast
Asia. For expense and a daily fee. Getting paid is another
matter. It’s never been about the money. Although my home
turf is Bangkok, I have also taken jobs in Phnom Penh,
Saigon and Pattaya, and am aways looking to expand my
horizon.
No matter where
I am tracking down a lead, in anytime you take a job in
Southeast Asia you can expect to ride a knife’s edge.
I spend a lot of time looking for an angle in places that
only toss up curves. And curves comes the razor. The rules
of geometry don't apply to the curves attached to chrome
poles, moving black light to the beat of fast music.
Zero Hour in
Phnom Penh receives German Critics Award for International
Crime Fiction
The
2004 German Critics Award for Crime Fiction (Deutscher
Krimipreis 2004)
has
been announced and Christopher G. Moore’s
Stunde
Null in Phnom Penh
(Zero
Hour in Phnom Penh)
was won in the
category of best international crime fiction. Last year
Dennis Lehane won this award for his novel Mystic
River. Previous international winners were: Ian
Rankin, Michael Connelly, Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy,
James Lee Burke, John le Carré, Carl Hiaasen,
and Joseph Wambaugh. So I am in decent company
for a change.
Characters
in the City of Angels |
My working turf in Bangkok extends from the shopping
malls, to Nana Plaza, Patpong, and Soi Cowboy, to the
slums of Klong Toey, and to the racetrack at the Sports
Club. My clients are the expats who live and work in
Thailand: some live the good life on a fat package,
others get by day to day on a nickel and dime. They
are the kind of ordinary people who get themselves cheated,
or find themselves in a bind or get themselves killed.
However you look at it, by the time they or their next
of kin walk into my office they are damaged.
My cases involve
greed, revenge, and business conflicts—the usual reasons
people find themselves in way over their head or on the
frontline where the body bags are filled with civilian
casualties. In Calvino’s world, most of those who survive
don't go home after one tour of duty. They become addicted
to the front. Like me, they volunteer for just one more
tour.
Without a guardian angel, I would have
been dead a long time ago. Buried. Forgotten. My Shakespeare-quoting
buddy Colonel Pratt is my insurance policy. Pratt plays
the sax, he’s tough, honest and knows the hidden forces,
the secret traps, and keeping me alive is his karma. The
colonel feels ne owes me. His feelings probably come from
an old debt of gratitude.I suspect he feels that it is
the kind of debt that is so large it can never been paid
off.
Without the colonel, I would also be
out of business and couldn’t survive in the hostile environment
of Bangkok.
Read a guidebook to find out where to
stay or to get a cheap meal in Bangkok, Phnom Penh or
Saigon. Read any Calvino PI novel to discover the hidden
places where the action throbs 24 hours a day, the small
bars and restaurants and back alley short-time hotels
that you suspect exist. These are the place you want to
experience, you won't find them on any map. And you want
to know something about the Thai language, and how the
Thais and farangs think about each other, the places they
meet, the things they say. On the street there is a way
to communicate. I know enough of the language to keep
one step ahead of trouble. Or it could be just the right
use of body language. Each book features one of my cases.
As I said, I just solved a murdernow on the look out for
a new case to challenge me. It's looking like another
year of poverty.
