Christopher G. Moore

I remember a spirit house from one of my brief trips to Thailand during the early 1970s. It was night when I saw it, and the colorful image has remained with me, probably because I didn't know what I had been looking at. Until I read this wonderful mystery. I hope I lit a joss stick and wai'd.

 

I don't know how "mysterious" this story is. As I've written elsewhere, for many of us, the mystery isn't the real point of the stories. We require that the central story (usually, some kind of love story, and almost always involving a guy or gal who's down on his or her luck, and fighting against imposing odds for truth, justice, and—in this case—the Thai way) be outside the mystery. Oh, and it helps if there's a love interest, too, although it often gets kind of painful, because it seems that to keep the romantic part of the series operational, each won love has to wither away or be blown up or run off with someone else or whatever.

 

Spirit House was the first in what has become a nearly 20-year series about an American private eye (what's he doing in Thailand?) who left Brooklyn and lives now in Bangkok. One of the series readers (evidently, another expatriate in Bangkok) writes in a review that the central character—Vince Calvino—changes over time, as has both Thailand and the author. I like this. The Lisa See Liu Hulan stories that got this web site going were written over a five-year span, and I could see differences due to differences in China (even though the author doesn't live in China). This fact is all the more evidence that what we're reading is a kind of travelogue—but a lot more interesting.

 

Vince and his very good friend, a kind of chief of police in Bangkok, are traditional Western heroes, going up against the bad guys (you can't count them, there are so many), with traitors to the left of them and innocent bystanders to the right, but on they charge, certain death facing them.

 

We see a lot of Thailand—or, at least, its life—along the way. I had read the John Burdett series before this book, and the perspective is slightly different, although I can't say why. Of course, Moore's hero is an American while Burdett's is mostly Thai. As with Burdett's novels, we spend a lot of time in the bars with the whores and ex-pats, and that's fine—that's what I saw of Thailand, too. But I also have the testimony of Peter O'Brien, son of a life-long friend, who spent three years in Thailand, in the countryside, and who has told me that the people of those areas are completely different from what we hear in the stories. Which of course doesn't mean they aren't there when you get to Bangkok. Thailand has a very conservative society, and the whores and pimps come from the segments of society that are below whatever passes for a poverty line. As Alfred Doolittle so charmingly tells us: "I'm too poor to have morals, gov'nor."

 

The bad guys are bad. And I almost stopped reading the book after about five pages. I don't need this, I told myself, but I fortunately kept going, and all fell into place. Moore write marvelously, and it is no surprise to see that he has published about 20 books in his lifetime, not all in this series. One even concerns speaking Thai, so we can presume he knows what he's doing in the language business. And, too, he still lives in Thailand. The love he expresses for these people in the course of describing them (and killing more than a few) is evidently based upon his own feelings. And we're the ones who benefit.

 

No one loves a country more than an expatriate, because he's known two countries, and has abandoned the other.

 

Paying Back Jack, Chris Moore's latest Vince Calvino thriller, is certanly exciting. And true to Moore's oft-expressed beliefs, his thriller fiction tells us a lot about the Thailand in which he has chosen to live.

 

My impression is that his mood was a bit more sour than usual as he wrote this one. Perhaps, the recent coup and re-establishment of military rule had reminded him of the realities of his adopted country. Also, he uses the "rendition" phenomenon that was probably hot news when we was writing as part of his story. In that aspect, Thailand becomes host to one of the interrogation centers that CIA apparently used to question and torture Mid-East militants. One of the several fiends of this story "works" at the center.

 

We see the usual bad guys from Thai society (wealthy folks with an eye not to upset the sources of their wealth), and the usual heroes of the street. In fact, if it hadn't been for an observation Moore makes as he tells his story—that at one point many office workers were on their way home, we could easily imagine that Thailand consists only of corrupt rich folks, poor people (both bad and good) working in the prostitution business, and one or two good cops. Well, one. I have no doubt of the reality Moore describes, but I wouldn't mind meeting a couple folks who go to university or who work in those office buildings.

 

Thailand remains the apparent hotbed of expatriate writers, at least of thriller/mystery/whatever sorts of books, and I suspect that reading these books will some day have the effect of supplying an answer to a question like "I wonder where I should go this year?"

 

--Michael Broschat, Nov 2009