Chronicler of the noir night

The Sunday Nation

 

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Kevin Cummings had to walk into the Checkinn99, up at the hawker-choked end of Sukhumvit Road. It was a muggy night. There’d been three muggings in the entranceway since suppertime.

That awful pun paraphrases the Firesign Theater, the American comedy quartet that’s one of the innumerable names dropped with a cheer-worthy clatter in Cummings’ book “Bangkok Beat”. Otherwise Cummings’ subjects tend to be grimly serious, at least in print – the noir-fiction mob of expatriate writers who are always stirring up trouble in Bangkok. Wise guys, otherwise.

Bangkok-based noir fiction is a niche genre that can just about squeeze comfortably through the fallopian tube of an entranceway into the Checkinn99, where these guys occasionally hang out. But it’s no gin joint, no matter what their imaginations try to tell them, and you only get mugged with amiable greetings.

Not that you have to make up stuff about the place. It used to be the Copacabana back in the noir ’50s and was a “hostess bar” long before the GIs arrived in town. In the Hello-Hanoi ’70s, Bob Hope and his USO crew would pop in. Embassy types still do. Bing Crosby was there and so was that youngster he sang “Little Drummer Boy” with, David Bowie. Not together, though, and definitely not singing.

The history of the Checkinn99 and its now-much-homier ambience are vital to “Bangkok Beat” because proprietor Chris Catto-Smith and his wife Jiraporn “Mook” Sriharach have gone out of their way to make couples, families and the artsy crowd feel welcome. They’re taping a kids’ TV show there, they’ve got Jazz Sundays and have put on Rocky Horror Picture Shows, and they’ve had a pair of Noir Nights too, where the authors told their tales.

The noir mob – specialising in gumshoe capers and other crime thrillers taking place on a soi near you – has got a lot of attention in recent years, and that, says Christopher G Moore, one of the sub-genre’s leading lights, is thanks in large part to having a place to meet. The Checkinn99 is like their office, with the whiskey behind the bar instead of in a desk drawer.

For about two years Kevin Cummings, a Californian married to a Thai who still spends time in some beach place he calls Surf City (no, not Pattaya), was just a literary groupie, hanging on their every word. Now he’s a writer, too. It must be catching.

The authors he’s met are almost all male, though the occasional dame strolls in. There’s Moore and John Burdett, Dean Barrett and James A Newman (who wrote the intro to “Bangkok Beat”), Timothy Hallinan and Tom Vater, Thomas Hunt Locke (who adds a short story of his own) and Collin Piprell, plus Jack Fielding, Matt Carrell, the late Simon Palmer, Colin Cotterill (who also created the book cover) and that really scary Jim Algie guy. 

Jerry Hopkins gets a visit and merit is made for the late Stirling Silliphant. The dames Cummings meets are Janet Brown and Cara Black, also established authors.

There’s the painter Chris Coles, whose neon portraits light Bangkok by night, a brace of poets – Alisdair McLeod and John Gartland (the latter’s new book, “Bangkok, Heart of Noir”, will be reviewed here soon). 

Also profiled or interviewed are a pair of muay thai champs, a Pattaya waitress, a Bangkok cab driver, a surfing historian, the remarkable Mama Noi, photographer Eric Nelson, comic-magician Doctor Penguin, Christopher Minko of the Cambodia-based band Krom and a couple of the outstanding jazz musicians who play at the bar. Even Jason Mraz says hello. The book’s noir theme isn’t a criterion for inclusion (though Krom’s music can get pretty gloomy).

Cummings might now be a member of the local scribes’ coven, but he continues to fret, in person and in print, that he lacks the polish of the Thailand-based writers he admires so much. In the book he does some meditating on Henry Miller, an author he seems to prefer over Dashiell Hammett or the other great storytellers of the gritty crime yarn. It’s a sort of “What would Henry Miller do?” musing (not least if the American who penned “Tropic of Cancer” had run away to Bangkok instead of Paris). 

Granted, there’s a coarse grain to Cummings’ composition, syntactical knots in need of sanding down, but his mix of disarming fun and considered analysis makes “Bangkok Beat” both entertaining and instructive. 

Many of the chapters come straight from his blog, Thailand Footprint, and the resulting repetition of names and events in the ebb and flow can be wearying. Yet this also instils an intimate familiarity with the scene, and by the end everyone feels like an old friend. If there are eccentrics among them, Cummings’ style is bubbly enough that at least no one ends up sounding like a character to be avoided in a dark alley.

“Writers have helped me observe the world better,” he says in his book. He takes to heart Miller’s phrase “forget yourself”, advising aspiring writers to instead be always gazing outwards at this world full of intriguing people and places. Yet Cummings has also accomplished what another published writer tells him, that a writer can’t be “true” (as Hemingway would put it) without injecting something of his own personality into the telling. “Bangkok Beat” is whole-hearted, and all the warmer for its frequent glimpse