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      — BANGKOK NOIR —

      This was the first time I’d ever gone to Bangkok by land and I felt odd not to be disoriented, as I am when arriving by plane. When you fly in across the Pacific, one of the first oddities you notice is that it’s the same day as when you left, but a different date. Ah, the International Date Line: the stories I could tell you. I once arrived in Taipei to interview some government official on the wrong day, only to find that the Taiwanese didn’t sigh too loudly, for they are used to such things. Another peculiarity of Bangkok is that, in my own experience at least, all flights arriving there do so at 0100 hours, regardless of their origin or the direction travelled.

      I used to stay in big hotels when I could afford them, but some years ago my friend Christopher G. Moore, the expat Canadian novelist, recommended that M and I stay at a clean, cheap Indian-run hotel in Soi 8 near Nana Station, and it has been our local headquarters ever since. In its little restaurant, deserted except for me, I refreshed my taste for the Bangkok Post and my impatience with the other English-language daily, the Nation. Reading these online is simply not the same. The Post was founded in 1946 by an American, Alexander MacDonald, using presses acquired at an auction of Japanese property seized after the war. MacDonald first arrived in the country by air — by parachute, actually. He was working for the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, helping to organize the Free Thai resistance movement in the north. I still regret that once, years ago, at an auction in aid of a Bangkok charity, I passed up one of the small maps of Thailand printed on silk that American and British operatives and pilots kept tucked inside their flight suits. I believe that the Post, when I became aware of its existence, was owned by the first Lord Thomson. Some people said he found it a convenient place to store his son-in-law.

      In Bangkok, as in major centres all over Asia, there is life everywhere, on every street, in every shop and at all hours. For many people such as myself it is not only a key destination in its own right, but the staging area and provisioning place for incursions into Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and so on. It’s a sprawling, polluted, congested, and deafening city of 10 million people — and twenty universities, thirty hospitals, and a recent architecture of astonishing ugliness, as the element of gigantism found in Asian religious cultures (all those giant Buddhas and the like) now finds expression in skyscrapers, as well. Many are decorated with replicas of foreign landmarks. It’s not unusual to come upon a scaled-down Tour Eiffel or Statue of Liberty topping off some enormous black shaft of an office development. Down at eye level, though, BKK (it is commonly known by its airport code) is a city of neighbourhoods, each of them almost a tribe unto itself.

      Some of these nabes are particularly associated with white foreigners. Transients have Khao San Road, which is synonymous with backpacks, hostels, and cheap phone cards. Expats, who are almost without exception far older than the trekkers, have Sukhumvit Road. It is the most important of five districts that shelter many thousands of Western foreigners known as farang (pronounced falang), most of them English speakers, who have fallen in love with the place or perhaps only with one of its citizens, or are enjoying a comfortable budget-retirement, or have decided for various reasons, legal, moral, or philosophical, not to return home. The Dickens of this demimonde (or maybe its Mayhew) is the aforementioned Christopher G. Moore, who has lived there several decades and, being a speaker of Thai, has learned a great deal about the workings of the host culture, as well as many secrets of the expats, most of whom are British or American. His middle initial prevents confusion with two other Christopher Moores — the American writer of trash-books read at airports and the Toronto historian and Governor General Award winner.

      So far, Christopher G. has published well over twenty novels and thrillers, all of them set in Southeast Asia and most of them in Bangkok, the city that, after all, is said to have inspired Blade Runner and is indeed a place of fascinating sleaze and colourful crime. The concept of full disclosure compels me to confess that a small literary press I started published two of his books in the Canadian market several years ago. One of them had some favourable reviews and sold modestly well, perhaps because it opens on a grisly murder in Vancouver (where Moore once taught condo law at the University of British Columbia). The other one was not at all commercially successful in Canada, where he has never been popular the way he is in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. Still, many Canadian readers of police-procedurals admire the books of his that feature Vincent Calvino, a disbarred New York lawyer who works as a PI in Bangkok, often in uneasy co-operation with the local cops.

      Reading his books, you might expect its author to be a tough guy, but he isn’t. He looks somewhat like the singer Tom Jones, is blessed with private school manners and bearing, and knows that the type of writing he does is dependent on expert listening. The last point was reinforced when, during a week’s worth of bar- and restaurant-hopping, he introduced me to some of his material, on the hoof, as it were.

      Sukhumvit (pronounce the v as a w), having been discovered by expats during the boom-time of the American War, is still rich in bars that are either survivors of, or tributes to, those times; joints with names that all sound like Rock ’n’ Roll Texas a Go Go. In one of these, Christopher casually introduced me to an acquaintance of his who, throughout a long conversation sustained by drunken energy, was careful to keep a nervous eye on the door. A Thai woman he used to know, it seems, had hired not one but two assassins to kill him, and they meant business, too. These things happen. In another such place, where there is not only a jukebox, but one full of the timeless works of, for example, Eric Burdon and the Animals, we met a fellow who had managed to crash one of the junta-sponsored wholesale gem fairs at Mogok in northern Burma, from which Westerners, other than the few big dealers invited from Europe and elsewhere, are emphatically and indeed forcibly excluded, not just at fair-time, but year-round. Mogok owes its status as a heavily militarized forbidden-zone to the fact that it’s the source of many of the world’s sapphires and most of its pigeon-blood rubies, the most desirable type. The fellow was telling us the detailed story of how he not only got in, but then managed to get out again, recrossing the Thai-Burmese border, on foot this time, with one of his trouser pockets full of samples.

      Smiling, being extremely courteous as always, Christopher sat, like Sebastian Flyte’s teddy bear, in one corner of our booth, which was made of knotty pine. Silently, and with unblinking eye-contact, yet with an apparently effortless air of attentive distraction, as well, he was committing the