Review
Christopher G. Moore
2011
Heaven Lake Press
Review by Peter Young in The Thai Literary Supplement #7 (December 2016).
Moore has edited two noir anthologies set in South East Asia, this one and Phnom Penh Noir (2012), but it’s this anthology’s introduction that has the best summation of ‘noir’ I’ve yet come across: “Hard- boiled stories make for uncomfortable reading, but you know somehow there’s the possibility of hope at the end (no puns are allowed in noir). Noir is black in the way certain death is black. No redemption, no hope, no light at the end of the tunnel.” The same description might not apply everywhere around the world that noir fiction is written, but perhaps it ought to, and there’s a certain characteristic ruthlessness to the darker undercurrents of South East Asian life that Moore has brought to light with this selection.
Firstly, of the twelve stories I was pleased to see some speculative fiction among the more traditionally bleak offerings, my favourite among them being Colin Cotterill’s energetic ‘Halfhead’, in which a fake Chiang Mai psychic is haunted by dreams of an old, dead woman with literally half a head, and he is forced by circumstance to bargain with her offer of crime-solving information from the spirit world. Needless to say it ends in the worst possible way for the clairvoyant, but then all along you knew it would.
There is also Christopher Moore’s near-future ‘Dolphins Inc.’; set mostly in Bangkok, the story begins with Thai misunderstandings of Japanese whaling and which bounces between locales and themes, requiring a little thought from the reader about water resources.
One story that is a little out of character with the rest is Eric Stone’s ‘The Lunch That Got Away’. It features an attractively nonviolent resolution to a criminal dispute between a poor Bangkok street fish vendor and a big restaurant, but it feels far from being ‘noir’ in the sense described above.
Of the two Thai writers in this collection, only one was familiar to me: Tew Bunnag, whose writing I admire greatly and have reviewed before, has a slowburn story about a mistress who tries to gain the upper hand over her lover, only to get outplayed herself. The other is Vasit Dejkunjorn, a retired police general who shows he knows a thing or two about Thai police corruption in his story ‘The Sword’. The portrait he draws of a crooked superintendent is concise yet contains an unexpected resolution that will likely have readers cheering.
Capping the collection is Collin Piprell’s ‘Hot Enough to Kill’. It sweats atmosphere, describing the workings in the mind of a poor Bangkok hitman as he carries out a job. It’s just work.
This anthology worked well for me.