Bangkok is one of the great cities in the world, but unlike other great metropolises it has no noir tales to its name. Bangkok Noir puts that to right.In this first ever noir anthology of Bangkok, twelve seasoned and internationally known—Thai and Western—writers have come together to make a powerful collection of crime fiction short stories that portray the dark side of this Asian metropolis where the lives of most citizens seem as far away from heaven as its Thai name Krungthep is distant from its meaning—City of Angels.In Bangkok Noir, the twelve short stories of various shades of black involve gangsters and hitmen, love and betrayal, the supernatural, the possessed and the dispossessed, and the far distant future. Titles in this collection include: John Burdett's Gone East, Stephen Leather's Inspector Zhang and the Dead Thai Gangster, Tew Bunnag's The Mistress Wants Her Freedom, Colin Cotterill's Halfhead, Pico Iyer's Thousand and One Nights, and Christopher G. Moore's Dolphin Inc.
Bangkok Noir
Edited by Christopher G. Moore
by
John Burdett | Colin Cotterill | Stephen Leather | Vasit Dejkunjorn | Tew Bunnag | Pico Iyer | Christopher G. Moore | Alex Kerr | Timothy Hallinan | Eric Stone | Dean Barrett | Collin Piprell
First published in Thailand in 2011
Contents
Introduction
Introduction
Behind the Thai smile and the gracefully executed
Glide along the daylight surface of Bangkok, and the gritty world of noir often seems light years away. The surface is polite, pleasurable and fun—
The dozen authors in
The potential list of subjects is long, but the stories in this collection will give more than a few insights into the Thai noir world. The idea of the national sport, Muay Thai—a combination of ballet, boxing, kicking and kneeing—is pure noir. That’s the idea of
There is no consensus on the definition of “noir” that covers all cultures. Writers don’t agree on one version of noir, and photographers and painters translate noir into their own image of darkness. Slowly, a general idea of noir in Bangkok has emerged over the last ten years. The foreign and Thai artistic noir movement has been growing during this period. Ralf Tooten, an award-winning photographer, has captured Bangkok noir in his photographs (one of which graces the cover of this book). The artist Chris Coles has painted the faces of men and women who move through the Bangkok underworld. The authors represented in this anthology, foreigners and Thais, have contributed stories that create powerful images, bringing the Bangkok noir movement another step forward. Thais and foreigners live together inside the world of noir. These stories record their experience of Bangkok’s dark side.
