Scratching the underbelly: Christopher G. Moore and Vinny Calvino

(Appears in this week’s Phnom Penh Weekly,  free at all good coffee-shops in Phnom Penh; look also for Kevin Cummings’ review of  Lawrence Osborne’s Hunters in the Dark.)

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The genre of Asian noir seems to be flourishing just now. With established writers like John Burdett, Tim Hallinan and Thomas Hunt Locke continuing to explore the dark side of human nature in Thailand, and Tom Vater, Bob Couttie and Steven W. Palmer setting their adventures in Cambodia, fans of the genre have a wealth of material to choose from.

But head and shoulders above all of these is the Godfather of Asian noir; Christopher G. Moore.

A Canadian and formerly a lawyer, Moore has now lived in SE Asia for 25 years. His first book, “His Lordship’s Arsenal”, was released in 1985 to critical acclaim. Since that first release, he has written over 20 novels, 200 essays and a book on the Thai language as well as other collaborations and editing jobs. But Moore is best known for his Vincent Calvino series, now standing at 13 novels – with a new one due in 2106 – perhaps the first in the genre to feature a Western protagonist in a South East Asian setting.

His writing style has been praised globally, with such eloquent descriptions as: “The Hemingway of Bangkok” (The Globe and Mail), “Dashiell Hammett in Bangkok” (San Francisco Chronicle), and “W. Somerset Maugham with a bit of Elmore Leonard and Mickey Spillane thrown in for good measure”(The Japan Times).

The Weekly sent along Phillip J. Coggan, himself the author of “Sweet Nights of the Naga King”, to find out what makes Moore and Calvino tick.

Ladies and gentlemen, readers and gawkers, inhabitants of the steamy Phnom Penh night; please plug in your ear-buds, because today we have a rare treat, a double interview with Christopher G. Moore and Vinny Calvino, the latter of whom doesn’t really exist except as a fictional character.

Click on Chris for the link to his author-page on Amazon. Vinny refused to be photographed.

Vinny: I what? Chris, what’s this guy saying?

Chris: Shut up and listen, Calvino, and you might learn something of use.

Vinny: That’s my line…

First, how long have you and Vinny been together?

Vinny: Been together? What’s this guy implying? Chris, if he keeps this up I’m gonna have to do summit. Summit serious.

Chris: Shut up Vinny. Seriously, I’ve been cleaning up your English and related messes for the last 25 years, and now I get nailed with some kind of Brokeback Mountain allegation.

So Vinny never had any real childhood? I mean, he just sort appeared out of nowhere?

Vinny: Hey, now he’s callin’ me an illegal! Serious, Chris, I’m gonna have to do summit about this guy.

Chris: He’s an ex-New York lawyer, who got on the wrong side of a Chinese Triad gang in Manhattan. He was trying to protect a friend, a young Thai guy named Pratt. His turf in Bangkok extends from the shopping malls, to Nana Plaza, Patpong, and Soi Cowboy, to the slums of Klong Toey, the racetrack at the Sports Club, and even the swanky shopping malls. His client list is as thick as a crooked cop’s wedge of notes. The clients are 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 have no clue about the culture, law enforcement and justice system or language. A set of non-skills guaranteed to land them in trouble. Cheated or killed. By the time they or their next of kin walk into Calvino’s office they are damaged and look to Calvino to patch them up. 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 Calvino, they volunteer for just one more tour and forget about New York.

Vinny: Noo Yoik.

Slums of Klong Toey, from Silent Tapes, a project by two photographers documenting and helping the people of the Bangkok slums and similar places around the globe. An excellent website – click on the picture for the link.

What?

Vinny: I said Noo Yoik. Dat’s how we sez it in Joysey.

He doesn’t talk like that in the books.

Chris: I had to clean him up. Taught him there’s no joy in Joysey.

And there’s not much in Bangkok either. Chris, what is noir?

Chris: Noir, like porn, has many definitions. You know it when you see it. The characters in noir live under a dark shadow where intimidation and violence are part of the fabric of life. When the outcome is hopelessness, desperation, sorrow, you can be certain you are down a noir road. The powerful forces with the guns are the winners; others yield or are destroyed in their path. A sense of doom prevails. A good example of what represents noir for me is found in Georges Simenon’s novel titled Dirty Snow.

Cambodia would seem to be the perfect home of noir. In fact you edited a collection of short stories, Phnom Penh Noir?

Chris: I tried to bring together a community of writers and artists in Phnom Penh Noir, publishing their stories, lyrics, and photography. I had the rare chance to work with legendary creative talents like Roland Joffe, James Grady and John Burdett along with a young generation of Cambodians. The best thing about the collection is the diversity of noir tales told through multiple points of view. Truth, mortality, regret, betrayal, and loss play out in these stories, poetry and lyrics.

Do you have any favourites in that collection?

Chris: That’s like picking threads out of an incredibly intricate Persian carpet as favourites. What makes Phnom Penh Noir work is the whole of the anthology creates a small universe of feelings, thought, motives, behaviour, and along the horizon of these experiences you find how storytellers carry history inside their imagination.

Vinny, you visited Phnom Penh, what did you think of our lovely city?

Vinny: I think you mean Zero Hour in Phnom Penh? That takes me back to 1993. I’ve been to Rangoon and Saigon. Okay, that amounts to handful of times I’ve left Bangkok since I arrived back in the 80s. It does a man good to get shot at in other places. You don’t take Bangkok so personally after that. These places are like Bangkok but not like. Back then it was…

He’s not talking like a cheap Al Capone knock-off any more, Chris! He sounds almost educated!

Chris: Vinny has a NYC side of his brain that does this sumo wrestling thing with the educated side. They flop around inside his muddy skull and after awhile you can’t tell one from the other.

Vinny: Can I go on? Thank you. Phnom Penh in 1993 was dirt back streets where chickens scratched, slums overrun by rats, and UNTAC forces chasing women, ghosts, and drugs.

I especially liked the visit to T3 prison. Chris, was that a real visit?

Vinny: Was it a real visit? This guy is seriously starting to annoy me.

Chris: Keep calm Vinny. He’s not armed. Yeah, the T3 prison scene was based on a real visit with UNTAC officers in 1993.

Inmates of T3 voting in the 1993 elections, covered by Chris Moore. The prison was demolished in 2000 and replaced by Prey Sar.

And the bit where you eat the dog?

Chris: Dog? I don’t remember eating any dog?

Vinny: Yes you do, it was that little place outside the jail, just a little street stall. I think the Golden Soyra is there now. That Golden Sorya place, that’s noir! We were trying to get on the good side of those Cambodian cops. They served us something brown and I put it in my mouth and all the Cambodians raised their glasses and toasted me, and I asked why and they said it was because not so many foreigners liked dog. Street mutt special someone said. Pratt was with us, he said it reminded him of New York.

Pratt?

Chris: He’s that fair pair of dice in a rigged casino called justice. Forget about climbing Everest. Even pushing a ladder against what looks like a molehill in Thailand requires an experienced Sherpa. And even then an avalanche has been known to bury a man if his chit cup is knocked over.

And Pratt is a cop who isn’t corrupt? All Thai cops are corrupt, aren’t they?

Vinny: Seriously, Chris, this guy is starting to annoy me.

Chris: Think of corruption as a plumbing problem. Pipes leak. Someone figures out putting bucket on the leak is profitable. Once that happens repairing leaks becomes difficult, if not impossible. And where are all of those pipes? Behind walls with nice pictures on them so you never know they’re there. You turn on the tap, water comes out. The leak doesn’t seem to hurt you. You move on.

 Your latest book was Crackdown, right?

Chris: Came out in March 2015.

I remember there were some Cambodians in that.

Chris: Yes. It’s set in Bangkok but a major figure is a Cambodian named Munny. He’s an illegal migrant, living in a derelict apartment building with about a hundred squatters. The basement is flooded and filled with fish, and the squatters make a living catching the fish and selling them in the market. So they start off, you see, in a condition of communal innocence.

A bit like the Garden of Eden?

Chris: You could say the Garden of Eden in dystopia. But then corruption starts. Some of the squatters form themselves into a council and start imposing rules. Let me read a bit and you’ll see what I mean:

The meeting-calling men referred to themselves as the Eight-Nine Safety Council and made it clear to everyone squatting in the building that from now on they were the ones who ran things …. A couple of men from other floors who challenged them were beaten up. After that no one, including Munny, risked offending the council.

 So society is based on the rule of violence ahead of the rule of law?

Phnom Penh, behind the Night Bazaar.

Vinny: The rule of law is based, ultimately, on violence, or the threat of violence. That’s half of what noir is about. Those officials with the monopoly over violence figure they can do a lot to improve their own position. About then things start to roll down hill and people get flattened.

And the other half?

Chris: Let me read you a bit more, about Munny’s wife, Chamey, when she tries to buck the system:

The Eight-Niners … set a quota on the number of fish each family could take from the basement pool for personal use. Beyond the quota, residents now had to pay for the fish…. The leaders of the Eight-Niners supplied the fish market from the pool. They also collected a “tax” to pay off the police and the owner. But as the new rules and demands increased, Munny said nothing.

Chamey wasn’t quiet. No one owned the fish in the basement. Anyone could see the massive numbers were sufficient for all to take as many as they wished. She complained, and her discontent reached the eighth and ninth floors. The Eight-Niners didn’t frighten her. They watched her taking fish from the basement, and when they told her to stop, she flashed a knife. She threw her last hundred-baht note at one of them.

“Here’s your tax,” she said. “Now leave me to feed my family.” She earned money frying and selling fish harvested from the basement.

“You owe us one thousand more. We want our money.”

Vinny: That’s just background. But that’s where it starts. And what Chris is saying is that the Munnys of this world matter. You should read that book by that guy Evans. Chad Evans. He just wrote a book about me. Nice guy. You should learn from him.

What’s it called?

Chris: Vincent Calvino’s World. One of the points he makes is that there are two ways of responding to the noir. One is Henry Miller’s way – withdraw from public life, create a private world of personal self-indulgence. That’s what old Henry did in Paris. The other way is George Orwell’s way – engage and fight. In Crackdown, Munny is taking Henry Miller’s way, and Chamey’s way is Orwell’s way. Not that things stay like that. Without conflict there’d be no story.

Oh, I don’t like conflict.

Vinny: Sure, buddy. That’s exactly the way the Eight-Niners want it.

Mr Moore, I wanted to ask you about Reunion, because it’s set in Cambodia. What’s it about?

Chris: It’s an unsentimental story of friendship, one formed in desperation, and nurtured by deception. It’s about the lies that are part of life when survival is in a killing field. Two men, one a journalist and the other a survivor, meet again years later. Both seek redemption and discover that the past, with its lies and deceit never morphs into the truth. This is a post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia story that explores friendship and survival, and how peace and justice remain unfinished business.

Oh right. Chris, I wanted to ask you something really personal here, if that’s all right.

Chris: Sure.

How can I become a noir novelist? I mean, if I had the right table to work at, and all that. Bought myself a black beret, lightweight trenchcoat. Can you teach me?

Chris: It’s not that easy…You could join the Bangkok Noir Authors Facebook page that I just launched with 8 other authors. That might be useful.

And Vinny, just one last question for you.

Vinny: Shoot.

Vinny, in Chad Evans’s book about you, he calls you “an existential bachelor” with a self-made moral code. What does he mean by that?

Vinny: That does it. I’m really gonna do summit about this guy right now!

Chris: I wouldn’t worry, Phil. There’s nothing to worry about in the analogue world. We are all digital in the expressions of our emotions, right? To be on the safe side, it would be wise to keep your precise location to yourself while in Bangkok. Sit with your back to a wall. That’s always a good precaution whether in New York or Bangkok. You just never know.

VINNY: At last Chris said summit that I can agree with. I mean that last sentence.

Smile.

Hunters in the Dark

Lawrence Osborne is being compared with the greats – Evelyn Waugh, Paul Bowles, Graham Greene. His most recent novel, Hunters in the Dark (from Kindle, for less than half the print price) , came out recently and is set in Cambodia. The basic meme is Westerns out of their depth in cultures they don’t begin to understand, with mythic overtones.

Plot summary from the Guardian:

A schoolteacher in the tiny Sussex village of Elmer, Robert [the central character] knows that his provincial English life is a cul-de-sac. The anomie that afflicts him is really despair at the pettiness and claustrophobia of England, at “a way of life that justified itself as being the pinnacle of freedom, but [which] had not come up with an alternative reason for existing once the freedom had been sucked out of it”. He leaves for Thailand, slowly settling into the decision not to return to that hated old life. The novel opens with Robert crossing over the border to Cambodia and gambling with the last of his savings to win $2,000. This stroke of luck sets into motion the machinery of a plot that comes to resemble a Newton’s cradle, one sphere colliding with another and transferring its energy and momentum to it, and so on, in a long, complex series.

If you want to read about it on the Sunday Times you’ll have to subscribe, but they do give a little author bio for free:

IT’S TAKEN Lawrence Osborne a long time to find his bearings as a novelist. A compulsive wanderer – born in Britain, he has lived in Paris, New York, Mexico, Morocco and Istanbul and is currently located in Bangkok; out-of-the-way travelling is a speciality – he has been equally wide-ranging as a writer. After his first novel, Ania Malina (1986), which criss-crossed ravaged Europe after the Second World War, he abandoned fiction for 26 years, publishing books on subjects as diverse as off-beat aspects of Paris, a journey into Papua New Guinea, autism, wine connoisseurship and perverse attitudes to sex.

Says the FT:

The bumbling Robert has little purchase in this world, where western culture is referenced only in terms of past glories. He thinks he has some insight into the country and its people; Osborne — who said in a Guardian interview last year that the most a writer confronted with an alien culture can do is to “make something out of his incomprehension”— knows that he doesn’t.

Even so, it is Osborne’s probing of the Cambodian psyche that gives Hunters in the Dark depth and substance. If this dark, teasing, elegantly written book has a flaw, it is that its author’s fascination with his characters’ belief in the “fantastical inevitability” of events results in implausibly tight plotting, a too neat tying-up of loose ends. But then life is often larger than literature.

And the New Statesman:

Grappling with manifold questions about identity and the tragic futility of material aspirations in a ruthless, brittle world, this novel draws you into a sun-struck realm where the survival of the fittest is more predicated on chance and where violence is a sudden, opportunistic enterprise. It had me thinking long and hard about how the traits that allegedly define you can be jettisoned easily when you are lost within yourself – and how, simultaneously, there is a bleak freedom in discarding the conundrum with which we all struggle: our tenuous identity.

For myself I’ll just say that Osborne is a stylist – a pleasure to read his prose.

Ghost Money (Crime Wave, 2015)

Cambodia 1996: PI Max Quinlan arrives in town to find missing, and very dodgy, businessman Charles Avery. Welcome to Ghost Money and the heart of existential darkness.

The book (which can be purchased here) has a marvellous opening: Max finds a body on the floor of Avery’s Bangkok apartment, battered to death by Quan Yin, the goddess of compassion. Very quickly it’s established that it isn’t Avery, but if not Avery, then who? And where’s Avery? As legions of Asia-noir writers from Chris Moore on down keep telling me, Bangkok is Ground Zero for danger and amoral sleaze, but it’s too law-abiding for Avery: he’s flown to Cambodia…

Cambodia in the mid-90s. I wasn’t there, I arrived in 2002, which, the true old-timers tell me, was far too late, but Nette’s Phnom Penh ambiance is convincingly realistic. The police still hang around on corners doing nothing (not quite nothing – when the boss needs cash they collect improvised fines from anyone unlucky enough to catch their eye), kids still beg on the Riverside and whores minister to the needs of terminally lonely drifters at Sharkey’s, and by golly Max stays at the old Hotel International – the building’s still there, though it’s not a hotel any more.

Hotel Intercontinental, 2008, from Andy Brouwer’s blog

Andy tells me it’s since been tarted up beyond recognisability.

I love Max, a man born right in the middle of a modern multicultural identity crisis, his father a dysfunctional Australian cop, his mother Vietnamese but Max never knew her, and though Max looks Asian he doesn’t speak Vietnamese, nor Khmer, but he does speak Thai. The supporting actors are pretty compelling too, especially Sarin the Cambodian interpreter, psychically scarred by the Pol Pot years, trying to find a way to survive in the new Cambodia. We all know a couple of Sarins. Add a varied gallery of expat chancers (“When you’ve used up your last chance there’s always Cambodia” – I can hear Bogie muttering that out the corner of his mouth) and you have Phnom Penh then and now.

Bogie at Sharky: “We’ll always have Cambodia”

There’s a thoughtful review of Ghost Money here, and the book has been frequently and favourably reviewed on Goodreads. One reader, struck by the long shadow the Khmer Rouge cast over the story, comments that “most accounts of the war in Cambodia treat it as a cola to the Vietnam conflict” – a cola? But we know what he means.

Nette’s been compared with Lawrence Block, and that’s high praise indeed. Andrew Nette is a go-to man on pulp fiction – his website, called pulpcurry (don’t ask me why) is a treasure. His personal profile on Goodreads says:

Andrew Nette is a writer, reviewer, film-lover and pulp scholar, based in Melbourne, Australia. His first novel, Ghost Money, a crime story set in Cambodia in the mid-nineties, was recently republished by Hong Kong based publisher, Crime Wave Press. He is co-editor of Beat Girls, Love Tribes and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 – 1980, forthcoming from Verse Chorus Press in 2015. He is one of the founders of Crime Factory Publications, a small Melbourne-based press specialising in crime fiction. He co-edits its magazine Crime Factory, and co-edited Hard Labour, an anthology of Australian short crime fiction, and LEE, an anthology of fiction inspired by American cinema icon Lee Marvin. His short fiction has appeared in a number of print and on-line publications, including Beat to a Pulp Hardboiled 3, Shotgun Honey Presents: Both Barrels, Blood and Tacos, The One That Got Away, Phnom Penh Noir and Crime Factory Hard Labour.

Sharky Bar (from Nana Journals)

In case you’re wondering about that reference to Sharky Bar, it features as the meeting place between Max and an informant in one of the early chapters, though not named. Personally I would have named it. It’s a lot tamer now than it was back in Max’s day.

Death in the Rainy Season (Anna Jaquiery, MacMillan, 2015)

Anna Jaquiery’s Death in the Rainy Season (the link is to her Amazon Kindle page) opens with a break-in in a quiet Phnom Penh street, followed by a murder. The victim of both is Hugo Quercy,  the brilliant and well-regarded head of an NGO called Kids at Risk. He’s also the nephew of the French Interior Minister, who is concerned there may be a scandal attached. The minister wants this settled as quickly and quietly as possible. Fortunately Police Commandant Serge Morel is holidaying in Cambodia, and so the Commandant, much against his wishes, is ordered to “assist” the local police, his task rendered no easier by his Cambodian opposite number’s apparent lack of interest in the case.

Without giving anything away, the list of suspects and motives Morel faces is huge: Quercy has been investigating local pedophiles, who might therefore have wanted to remove him; all is not well between Quercy and his wife; and Quercy has recently branched out into gathering evidence about land-grabbing, which could have earned him enemies in high places (and which would, of course, explain the unwillingness of the Cambodian police to take much interest in the case).  This is Anna’s second novel, following The Lying Down Room, which also featured the melancholic, paper-folding Morel. I asked Anna some questions by email.

1. Anna, can you tell us a bit about yourself – your life seems to have been quite adventurous. Has it influenced your decision to write about exotic places?

There’s definitely a link there! My mother is French and my father is a Malaysian-Indian. He was a diplomat and we moved around a great deal – every three years or so. I grew up in Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, New Zealand and Russia. After I finished school (in Moscow), I moved to France for my university studies. I’ve worked as a journalist in a few places. We’ve been in Australia for seven years and are actually in the process of moving again, to New Zealand.

2. What drew you to take Phnom Penh as the setting for “Death in the Rainy Season”? (I was very struck, incidentally, by the way you made the city real – the details are absolutely spot-on).

Thank you, I’m so glad you think so. I’m no expert on Cambodia. But I’ve always had an interest in its history. I lived in Phnom Penh as a child and we left in the early part of 1975, before the Khmer Rouge entered the city. I was too young to remember any of it, but I grew up with my parents’ nostalgia about the place. I’ve been there a few times and during my last visit two years ago, I made the most of every minute, absorbing what I saw – I walked around Phnom Penh for hours on end – and listening to the stories people told me about their experiences there. Phnom Penh has a special place in my heart and I wanted to bring it to life in my book.

3. Serge Morel is not quite the conventional noir detective – as Angela Savage pointed out in her review, he drinks in moderation, doesn’t smoke, and is inclined to melancholy. He also has origami for his hobby, surely a fictional first.

It’s true I can’t think of any other detective who does origami in their spare time…! It wasn’t something I planned. As I developed Morel’s character, it eventually came to me that this would be something he’d be good at and would enjoy doing. It seemed to suit his character (as I see him). Origami, it seems to me, requires patience and precision, a predilection for solitude and introspection, as well as a poetic nature.

4. It’s been said that the elements of story-telling are plot, character, setting and tone (I got the list from Tim Hallinan’s interview with Dana King) – would you agree? How do see them in your own writing?

Character comes first, without a doubt. Simply put, if readers feel invested in the characters in a story, they will want to know what happens next. When I give up on a book it’s usually because the characters seem lifeless or one-dimensional. Setting is also very important to me. P.D James once said it was what came first for her and it’s certainly one of the first things I think about when I start working on a new book. Generally speaking, I tend to start with a premise – a question – and the plot flows from that. Tone, or style, is something you develop over time, by writing and gradually finding your own voice.

5. I gather you were quite meticulous in getting the pathology of your murder right (the state of poor Hugo’s skull certainly sounded convincing to me!) Death in the Rainy Season also touches on pedophile rings in Cambodia, land-grabbing, and the inner dynamics of the aid industry. Can you tell us a little about your research?

I spend quite a bit of time on research. With Death in the Rainy Season, I did a great deal of reading and talked to people who lived in Cambodia, including locals, academics and aid workers. I visited Phnom Penh and spent several days just walking everywhere, taking things in. I also keep in touch with people who are experts in their fields, whether it’s paper folding, policing or forensics.

6. Who and what have been influences on your work? What writers do you admire most?

It’s an eclectic list. I have often said that two leading influences are Graham Greene and Anton Chekhov. I enjoy many authors of Indian origin (this may have something to do with my Malaysian-Indian background), including Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Vikram Seth, Anita Desai, and Jhumpa Lahiri. I admire writers like Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Colm Tóibín. As far as crime fiction goes, I’m a big fan of Denise Mina’s books. Aside from hers, recent crime novels I’ve also loved include Garry Disher’s Bitter Wash Road, Derek B. Miller’s Norwegian by Night and Eva Dolan’s Long Way Home.

Interview with thriller writer Tim Hallinan

It’s my pleasure to be carrying this interview simultaneously with Angela Savage, who writes the excellent Jayne Keeney mysteries starring a female PI in Thailand, Margot Kinberg, who blogs at Confessions of a Mystery Novelist, and Kevin Cummings, who runs one of the most comprehensive Thailand blogs I know of. As Kevin says, if you haven’t read Tim Hallinan yet you should; but I’d add that you should also dip into these blogs.

  Tim Hallinan (his excellent Blog Cabin here) began his career as a writer in the 1990s with the distinctly noir Simeon Grist series. In 2007 he began a second series, set in Bangkok and featuring “rough-travel” writer Philip (“Poke”) Rafferty and his attempts to cobble together a family comprising a former go-go dancer and a precocious street urchin named Miaow. In 2011 he returned to the Los Angeles setting for his third series starring Junior Bender, the best private detective a mobster could have. The second Junior, “Little Elvises”, has just been nominated for the Shamus Award as Best Private Eye Novel of 2013, while the next Junior Bender, “Herbie’s Game”, has been chosen as one of the coming summer’s top ten thrillers by ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY magazine and as one of the ten best thrillers for July by Amazon. It’s also been selected as an IndieNext book of the month by the U.S. association of Independent booksellers, and a great review just appeared in BOOKPAGE (with the title These Boots Are Made For Kicking Butt – I wish I’d thought of that!)

“Herbie’s Game”, the fourth in the Junior Bender series, will be appearing in mid-July, to be followed in November by the sixth Poke Rafftery.

1. Tim, can you tell us a little about “Herbie’s Game”?

HERBIE’S GAME is the fourth in my series of books about Junior Bender, a first-rate Los Angeles burglar who moonlights (when forced to) as a private eye for crooks.  He’s been the smartest guy in the room for most of his life, and that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the thugs in his (anti)social circle, and when one of them becomes the victim of a crime or a threat, they know they’re not going to get a sympathetic, gee-we’d-better-solve-this-tout-suite reaction from the cops, so they turn instead to Junior. What this usually means that he’s in danger of being killed by the culprit if it looks like he might succeed, on one hand, and–on the other hand–in danger of being killed by his client if he fails.  So in addition to solving the crime, Junior has to pay a lot of attention to staying alive.

In HERBIE’S GAME, a continuing character, a sort of executive crook named Wattles, finds his office burglarized one fine morning, and the only thing missing is a piece of paper on which he unwisely wrote the names of the crooks in a chain he was using to pass along to a hitman the name of the victim and the payment.  The chain guarantees that the hitman has no idea who hired him and it also builds an ideal defence case for Wattles because if things go awry, all the prosecution witnesses will be convicted felons, and as one character says, defence lawyers have a word for such trials: they call them acquittals.  Wattles thinks Junior might have committed the burglary, but Junior knows immediately that the thief was his mentor, the legendary Herbie Mott, who took Junior under his wing when Junior was only seventeen and became a surrogate father to the budding burglar.  And then Herbie shows up dead, with no stolen piece of paper in sight, and Junior knows that he has to follow the names in the chain to get to Herbie’s murderer.  As he does, he begins to find that Herbie may have been a very different kind of man that Junior thought he was, and Junior has to ask himself how much of the life he’s living — a life that frequently leaves him feeling unsatisfied and adrift — is his own invention, and how much of it is just Herbie’s game.  Sorry to rattle on at such length.

2. “Herbie’s Game” is a very funny book, and the humour derives mostly from the characters. In fact I get the impression that you enjoy writing bad guys more than good guys. What is it about crooks that excites your imagination?

They have a special energy. They don’t have to be politically correct, or even polite.  They can say whatever they want. They can go from A to D without bothering with B and C. Best of all they have highly personal and idiosyncratic moral codes, which they frequently invent on the fly.  In my non-Junior books, I usually have to work to keep the bad guys and gals from taking over.  I decided to deal with that issue by writing a series that’s essentially all crooks, and writing them makes me very, very happy.

Another thing I like about writing the Juniors is that, for all of us, whatever we’re doing makes sense to us. I think much of what the characters in these books do, sometimes on a daily basis, skirts the fuzzy edge of insanity, and part of what makes their characters so much fun to write are the internal justifications and accommodations they’ve made in order to accept the things they do.  But when the tide goes out and they’re old, like Dressler or Burt the Gut, what’s left is just a normal person, usually not very happy.

3. You also have an amazing rapport with female characters – I’m thinking Dolly’s adolescent beginnings in the movie game in “The Fame Thief”, Rose’s journey from village beauty to Bangkok bargirl, and the daughters of Junior and Poke. 

I have no explanation for that.  Until three Rafferty books ago — Breathing Water, I think — I’d never written two women alone in a room.  I was afraid to — how did I know what women talked about when no men were around?  But then, for QUEEN OF PATPONG, I was stuck writing huge section of the book — 40,000 words or something – that was all women, and women at a very intimate juncture in their lives.  Having been forced into the sex trade, they were trying to find a way to lead their new lives while keeping their hearts and spirits intact and learning to divorce sex from emotion and intimacy.  And the story and characters just came in huge bolts, like yardage.  Geraldine Page, who knew all there was to know about acting, said, “When the character uses you, that’s when you know you’re really cooking. You know you’re in complete control, yet you get the feeling that you’re not doing it.  You don’t completely understand it, and you don’t have to.”

It feels since QUEEN like I’m writing women all the time, and it’s great because it’s opened up a whole range of stories I couldn’t have written otherwise. And as for Miaow, she’s always been the easiest character in the series because she always, always has an agenda.  And I can’t say much of anything about THE FAME THIEF — that whole book arrived by air mail.  I just wrote as fast as I could to keep up.

4. Your second book this year is “For The Dead”, the sixth in the Bangkok-based Poke Rafferty series. Can you tell us something about this?

Well, speaking of Miaow, FOR THE DEAD is largely Miaow’s book.  On the thriller side it’s a story about police corruption, power, and murder on a grand scale, but on the emotional side it’s about what happens to a 13-year-old girl who’s created a new identity to impress the snotty kids in her fancy school when every lie she’s told is suddenly exposed and she loses even the boy she was falling in love with and–she thinks–the security of the home Poke and Rose made for her.  It is, to put as benign a face on it as possible, a major growth experience.  Things also change forever, over the course of the book, for Poke and Rose. (I will say with some astonishment, since the book almost killed me, that it’s getting some of the best early reviews of my life.)

5. It seems to me that each adventure in the Poke series centres around Poke’s attempts to create a family in the midst of a world which is essentially malignant. Poke wins every battle, though only just, and with each victory his private world of love and family is strengthened. What’s your own take on the world of the Poke series?

You’re spot on. I think of it as a series about three people who have unexpectedly been given a second or third chance at a kind of life they thought they could never have.  It’s almost an accident that the family is so central.  When I wrote the very first book, I wanted to make it clear from the beginning that this was not a me-love-you-long-time book in which beautiful brown women fall helplessly and inexplicably in love with uninteresting white males. So in our first glance at Poke ever he’s holding his daughter’s hand and following his wife as they go grocery shopping.  And then Miaow takes off after Superman and the center of the book’s interest shifts to that apartment.  I had to fight to keep the thriller moving forward.  If I have my way I’ll write the series until Miaow moves out, at 19 or so, leaving Poke and Rose behind.  One of things I like best about the Pokes is that in the middle of the city of instant gratification you’ve got three people clinging for all they’re worth to the middle-class ideal of a functioning, loyal family.

6.  Both the LA and the Bangkok series seem to me to be extremely visual and filmable. Who do you see playing Junior – Johnny Depp? How about Poke – give Owen Wilson a try on that?

Boy, you got me.  The Pokes were bought for cable although the experiment failed, and the Juniors have been optioned a couple of times.  I’m hampered in my attempt to answer this question by the fact that I watch almost nothing.  Poke is part Filipino, so someone with some Asian blood would seem to be called for.  Keanu Reeves looks interestingly battered in the fascinating documentary he directed about the transition from film to video.  There’s an actor attached to Junior right now, and while I can’t say who it is (in case it falls through) he’s no one who would come immediately to your mind.  I think he’s got to project intelligence; someone once suggested Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and when I saw him, I thought he’d be great.

7. With two books out this year, what’s next? I understand you’re working on a return of the main character from your very first series, Simeon Grist, in what sounds like a very novel scenario. Any news on that?

The seventh Simeon, PULPED, has been finished for more than a year but so it’s far unsatisfactory to me, although I think about 80% of it works.  What happens is that Simeon has been banished to a kind of limbo that’s reserved for the heroes of unsuccessful crime series.  When the last unsold copy of the final book in the series is pulped to make paper for a new (and presumably better) book, pop, the character finds himself stranded, possibly forever, in the environment his/her author created as the primary setting, in a kind of gerrymandered neighborhood where everyone else is also the hero/heroine of discontinued crime series.  This is kind of a shock to begin with because fictional characters don’t know they’re not real until they’re suddenly in limbo, severed from the real world. The only connection with the world in which we live is when someone down here opens one of the books in the series, at which point Simeon (or the hero of whatever book it is) can look up, so to speak, through the page at the person who’s reading it.  He’s doing just that when someone kills the reader.  He doesn’t have enough readers to take this lightly, so he has to find a way down there and find out whodunnit.  That gives me a chance to write a lot of (to me) very funny and quite difficult scenes between a real person and a fictional one, including a love affair.  If I had a month I could (and eventually will) rewrite the first 25%, which is where the problems are.

So this July, HERBIE’S GAME comes out, and in November it’s FOR THE DEAD.  At the moment I’m writing the seventh Poke, THE HOT COUNTRIES, and the fifth Junior, KING MAYBE.  God willing, they’ll both be good.

8. I think it was Dorothy Parker who said something to the effect that she hated writing but loved having written – meaning, I guess, that writing is hard work. P.G. Wodehouse in contrast brought out slightly more books than he had years in his life. Are you a Parker or a Wodehouse?

Writing is very hard work and enormous fun at the same time.  There are days when I’d rather be a lab rat than write, and there are days when writing is the only thing in the world that matters to me.  I hate to do it and I love to do it and I can’t imagine doing anything else.

9. Every day we see articles about the demise of traditional bookstores and publishers in the face of Amazon and Kindle, and even warnings about the death of books. Joe Konrath, of course, feels that books and writers will get along very well without publishers and booksellers. You yourself brought out Junior as a self-published ebook series before switching back to traditional publishing. Where do you see the future heading?

I’m no prophet, although I think the growth of online commerce of all kinds is inevitable, barring some absolutely horrific systemic security breach that drives people back to the stores.  But where you buy the book or what format you buy it in–both those things are just delivery systems for the text.  And I think that text is alive and well and will continue to thrive as long as people want to tell and read (or hear) stories.