Bangkok Noir

The boy called Beer limped forward and helped her up. Instantly, she was slapping him, hard, and then she clawed his face and backed off. “All you had to do was take the money,” she said. “Make me look like a victim and take the money. You stupid boy.”

She lowered her head to look again at Wallace. She said, “I liked him.”

Thirty seconds passed in silence. No one even shuffled his feet. The woman extended her hand, and the boy with the crimped head passed her a tight crumple of bills. She tucked them into the front of her dress, brushed cement dust from the black fabric and leaned down to straighten Wallace’s shirt, which had been pulled up when he slid down the wall. Then she smoothed the long gray hair from his forehead. The boys filed out, leaving her there, her eyes on Wallace’s face.

“Long time ago,” she said to no one, not even knowing she was speaking English. “Long time ago, I think you was hansum man.”

Timothy Hallinan

Timothy Hallinan is an American thriller writer, based in Southern California and Southeast Asia. In the 1990s, Hallinan created the erudite private eye Simeon Grist, who appeared in a total of six novels, all set in Los Angeles. Since publication in 2007, his second series, set in Bangkok, has received critical acclaim.Tim has lived off and on in Thailand since the early 1980s. His Bangkok-based series features a rough-travel writer named Philip (“Poke”) Rafferty, who has settled in the Thai capital and is in the process of trying to cobble together a family comprising Rose, the former go-go dancer he loves, and a precocious street urchin named Miaow. His newest series, which begins with the 2010 novel Crashed, features a burglar named Junior Bender who moonlights as a private eye for crooks.

Daylight

Alex Kerr

All the witnesses agreed. The victim, an upcountry visitor to Bangkok of no particular importance, had died by stabbing on the BTS platform at three in the afternoon. He was thirty-eight years old, was named Kaew, had worked in a motorcycle repair shop in Khon Kaen and had died from stab wounds to his legs, abdomen and lungs. After a thorough autopsy had determined the cause of death, the family had collected the body and taken it back to Khon Kaen for cremation.

Including Kaew’s brother Nop, there had been about thirty witnesses on the crowded platform that day, of whom six had come forward to the police. Two young office ladies had been quick enough to actually record the incident on their cell phone video cameras, and the images were crystal clear because it had been a bright, sunny afternoon. They had all pinpointed the same person as the murderer, who had been duly questioned by the police.

At this point the rather thin file ended. An open and closed case, really. I put it down on the desk, looked out the window at Bangkok’s rows of white skyscrapers stretching off under the pale light of early morning and wondered why this would interest anyone. It must have been a very slow day in New York because my editor had somehow become aware of a murder on the Skytrain in Bangkok and asked me to look into it.