CHRISTOPHER G. MOORE

The Cultural Setting and the Cultural Detective

CHRISTOPHER G. MOORE is a novelist who has lived in Thailand since 1988. His twenty-two novels appear in twelve languages. Published in 2011, 9 Gold Bullets is the twelfth novel in the Vincent Calvino series, featuring a Jewish Italian-American private detective from New York City. A feature film based on the Calvino series is in development. Moore has also written seven stand-alone novels, the Land of Smiles trilogy, and is the author of three nonfiction books, including The Cultural Detective (2011).

 

 

If you write a mystery set in a foreign land, the location becomes an important aspect of the story. Culture means the language, religion, customs, rituals, and history that everyone in that place largely accepts as the basis for their identity. So when an American detective appears in Bangkok, the story can’t convincingly proceed as if it were set in Boston or Toronto.

When the detective walks along the streets of Bangkok, he notices “spirit houses” and the offerings left in front of them, motorcycle taxis, street vendors selling everything from food to pirated DVDs, and signs in the Thai language. These are the exterior, visual aspects of Thai culture. As soon as he talks with a Thai or enters a Thai office or house, then other aspects of culture appear.

Curiosity and close observation are essential for a writer of any kind. In the context of a foreign country, these skills or talents become vital if the narrative is going to succeed. Crime fiction relies upon a good grasp of the criminal justice system, conflicts that lay half submerged within the social and economic structure of a society, and understanding what drives some people to crime. Greed, ambition, opportunity, weakness, limited education, bad neighborhood, absent father or mother, abuse of one type or another are all possibilities.

You may think that people are people wherever you find them and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. We share more things than we’d like to believe. That said, the small differences from language, religion, culture, and history do matter in the ultimate identity of a person. People, in other words, are mostly generic. The task of a fiction writer is to bring a sense of credibility to the purpose of a character’s life, his or her choices, and to represent the genuine obstacles a person in that culture would face.

Novels aren’t sociology textbooks. They aren’t history or language books, either. The goal of learning through observation, questioning, and research is to draw a character that is a product of such influences, without making the reader feel that they are reading long passages of background narrative. And the novelist, by creating characters that are authentic in the context of the culture in which they live and work, allows the reader a way to enter and experience that “foreign” world. Once inside that world, the reader also has the pleasure of reflecting on his or her own native culture and how he or she would have done things differently.

The cultural conflict between people can be drama or comedy. I have a good Thai friend who spent time in America as a high school student. He’s very bright, and he speaks fluent English. I will call my friend Khun Daeng (daeng means “red”), though it isn’t his real name. Two friends came to Thailand to visit him and his family. His mother invited the two Americans to her house for tea. She also speaks fluent English and has a noble-like personality. When they came to the door, both Americans, who must have done research about Thai customs, started to remove their shoes. This indeed is an old, widely practiced custom in Thailand. Everyone removes their shoes before entering a private household. As the Americans stooped down to remove their shoes, Khun Daeng’s mother insisted that they shouldn’t bother. Both looked up at her and said it was no problem to take off their shoes. But the mother again persisted and both Americans rose to their feet, shoes on, and walked into the house where they enjoyed a wonderful tea.

Later that evening Khun Daeng received a phone call from his mother and she was upset with him and his friends. Why was his mother upset? Because his friends were so rude to enter her house with their shoes on. Didn’t they know anything about Thai culture? She was shocked that they would traipse through her house with shoes that may have stepped into the most vile of roadside excretions and drag those germs and bacteria into her life. “But Mother, I stood next to them, and you told them that they didn’t need to remove their shoes. You told them not once but twice.”

She was steadfast in her response. “They simply should never wear shoes into a Thai house.”

Here is the classic cultural gaffe that makes for a story. The mother was being polite; Thais value politeness and hospitality above all else, and they wish to make a good impression on their guests. But the guests are supposed to understand that when a Thai hostess insists that they can keep on their shoes, she doesn’t really expect them to follow her command. She expects them to ignore her and take off their shoes. Her offer of politeness isn’t to be taken at face value. But how were the two American visitors to know? This isn’t something that is spelled out in the Thai guidebooks.

Here is the main point of the story. A novelist should be able to bring into the story incidents that reveal cultural aspects of character that a reader would never find in a guidebook. The guidebook, like the Discovery Channel program on a Thai village, isn’t going to give much more than a superficial picture of cultural life. If you want a reading audience to trust you enough to follow you into a foreign land, then you must take them into the heart of the matter, peel back the mystery, and reveal the way local people process their reality and make that part of the story.

In other words, you become a cultural detective. Rather than tracking down a missing person, your job as a writer is to track down the forces in a society that shape the psychology, beliefs, and underpin the actions of people who are shaped by it. A good cultural detective looks for clues in the behavior of others, in their relationships, and how they go about their daily lives from morning breakfast, to the office, to a restaurant or bar, to the nightlife. All the while, when you become that cultural detective, you are constantly weighing the evidence, evaluating it, and reexamining your deductions before moving on. Your readers are following your mental calculations as you take them through this process.

The challenge is to do this with a minimal amount of explanatory details, foreign words, or local slang phrases—because to overdo the foreign parts will likely cause confusion if not indifference. That’s why the best writing absorbs the details into the story and character so that they appear naturally as the narrative moves forward. The reader doesn’t expect you to make them an expert. They are reading a story. They come to the party for different reasons than people who read a guidebook, a memoir, a biography, a cultural history, or a language guide.

The next time you decide to set a book in Hong Kong, Saigon, Bangkok, or Tokyo, remember that there are many people who know these places very well. And not just the guidebook information on where is the best hotel to stay in or the best restaurant for sea bass. People who understand the culture, language, and history of these places are like musicians who immediately hear the missed note, the one-beat-too-long delay, and before you know it, they turn off the music and they close the book. Being a good cultural detective will go a long way to avoid disappointing your reader. And if you have friends from the place where you have set your story, they can also be good sounding boards as to whether you should take off or keep on your shoes.

EXERCISE

You want to write a scene set at a funeral that takes place in Bangkok, Thailand. The deceased is a long-time expatriate and he has left behind a Thai wife and two children. The funeral service includes Thais and foreigners who will come to the temple each evening at seven-thirty p.m. for a three-day period.

Keep a notebook record of what activity goes on inside the Buddhist temple. What is the role of the monks? Where does the food come from for the visitors? How do the foreigners and Thais relate to each other? Do they sit together, talk together; are they friendly to each other? What is the role of the widow and the children and how is that revealing of character, culture, and place? Find out what occurs on the morning of the cremation—who attends this service, who officiates, what does the coffin look like, and what is the ceremony? Detail the full sequence of events.

Assume that the central character of the story is the deceased’s brother from New York. He hasn’t ever been to Thailand before. He was estranged from his brother for all of these years. When he appears at the temple for the first day of the services, what will his impressions be? Will he understand the nature of the service? And importantly, what will he come to understand about his brother’s life through his widow, children, and friends?

How will the brother’s grief and loss be expressed in this setting?