It’s a question I’m often asked these days: Jack, what does a singing detective,
a flying saucer and an actress gassing herself to death got to do with coconuts?
A few years back I’d published The
Adventures of Baron Schalken, a swashbuckling
gothic romp set in a speculative Napoleonic world and was incredibly passionate
about it. Unfortunately nobody else was. I knew it was going to be a struggle –
new genre, unknown author, battling against a stereotyped Thailand – but
nothing prepared me for the massive disappointment. Put my soul into it. I
figured that if you’re going to invest all that time, hard graft and love it
should be into something you’re passionate about otherwise what on earth was
the point? I mean, really. But instead of writing a Siamese adventure maybe I
should have written that crime novel after all.
About six months after Adventures sank
I read an article about Elmore Leonard the best-selling author. Not getting anywhere
with his cherished Westerns, he’d gone to his local library to see what people
were actually into. Yep, shelves stacked with crime books. So he switched to
crime, sold millions of books and Hollywood turned them into hugely successful
films. I also knew there was an established market for crime novels set in
Thailand, invariably about bargirls and expats. And then there were the
ubiquitous ‘I’m a Westerner in Thailand Having a Uniquely Surreal Experience’
sort. Whatever the merits of these books, if I was going to write a crime story
then it still had to different.
So I flew back out to Hungary, beat a path to my favourite café in Pest,
parked myself in the corner, ordered breakfast and got to work. Now what new
kind of crime story to write? The spec obviously included Thailand, Zen
Buddhist elements and, err, crime. Yes, well. And that was it. I had fragments
but just couldn’t think of anything else! Couldn’t move it forward at all and
ended up getting incredibly frustrated and depressed (no surprises there then);
the weeks passed and not even a credible main character. And then one of those strange
things happened.
Back at Heathrow airport I bumped into a friend of mine I hadn’t seen for
ages, back from Japan and determined to return some things he’d borrowed. It
wasn’t a big deal but I appreciated the thought. A week later a box full of
DVDs arrived in the post, including the BBC award-winning drama The Singing
Detective. It centered on a tormented writer who is confined to a hospital
bed and forced to confront his past, with the action swinging between present
and imagined past. Yes, suddenly I had a frame narrative and a lot more besides.
The nurse gave me the idea for Miss Fromm and I loved the idea of vintage music
– Merv Griffin’s I’ve Got a Lovely bunch
of Coconuts should have been in it– ironically counterpointing the action. And
then there were the clothes, pulp books and postmodern sensibilities. And it
was very British, very darkly comic. I had the makings of a story.
It’s amazing how the process works really. It’s like you can’t find what
you’re looking for but then a spark, an idea or a chance encounter just
releases the floodgates. Ideas zooming around in my head at all hours of the
day and night. The challenge is to harness it all into something coherent – a pen
and paper by the bed is a must! I can’t sleep properly and always end up
exhausted at the end of the process. Detective
was the catalyst but I still needed an actual plot. So I re-supplied my comprehensive
drinks cabinet, armed myself with fresh notepads and pens, and spent the next
three weeks going through my collection of noir films – and nearly drove my
wife mad in the process. I eventually settled on a plot that incorporated conspiracy,
murder and blackmail with all sorts of unexpected twists. The story would have a
British rather than American edge; more Brighton
Rock than Double Indemnity, and the
comedy music hall rather than Vaudeville.
As luck would have it, around this time my former psychiatrist gave me a
copy of Mathew Sweet’s wonderful Shepperton
Babylon, all about the lost world of British cinema. This was a gold mine
of scandal, secrets and forgotten films and stars of the silent era, such as
the cockney actress who committed suicide after her career nosedived into
obscurity. I loved the idea of a long-forgotten British silent film shot in
Bangkok and decided to incorporate this and other morsels into the story.
For the setting I decided on wartime Siam in the forties. In the summer I
returned to Bangkok where I explored old streets, stared up at telegraph poles,
peered through broken windows, persuaded a few aging souls to part with their
secrets and generally got stared at. I also read old newspaper clippings,
bought Martin Booth’s Gweilo about his
childhood in fifties Hong Kong and re-read A
Woman of Bangkok. I drew all this together to create an exciting urban
setting, based on real places and events.
Now enter stage left – Orson Milo Palmer, the main character in the story:
a part-time Buddhist, contradictory, funny, violent and perpetually
disappointed. He’s based partly on the Singing Detective and that great icon of
American noir, Robert Mitchum. I also put in one scene where Palmer is paid for
sex, in order to subvert the usual male-female power roles in Thai fiction. I
realised pretty early on that I was missing a killer female. But I replaced this
staple noir ingredient with Miss Fromm in the frame narrative and Angel in the
main action. No Pattaya bargirls or femme fatales, these two were much more
interesting, complex almost surreal females of existential ambiguity.
I worked through a series of drafts but the novel still wasn’t quite ‘Jack
fielding’ enough so I thrust the speculative elements into a higher gear. Now wartime
Siam and the world in general wasn’t quite what it appeared at all. I
deliberately avoided explaining too much but there were all sorts of clues,
such as the bubble cars on the roads, the comic book stories with flying
saucers over Big Ben, predominance of Italian companies and the geisha fashions
of the dance hall girls. A speculative setting would be more interesting; I
could explore values and morality in a subtly changed world. I could ask how it
impacted on the social and everyday lives of people and not just
the big geo-political picture. The central plotline about the mysterious
Operation Agarthi was based on actual ‘what-ifs’ I’d researched. A real-life
victim of murder makes an appearance in the story but is reincarnated, so to
speak. In 1946 Margery Gardner died at the hands of sadist Neville Heath in a
London hotel but we meet her in Zen City, still very much alive, having just
arrived on a ship to seek her fortune out East. I also thought it would be
interesting to make some connections with Shadows
and Pagodas. So Abbot Od makes a number of appearances as Palmer’s
confessor and spiritual adviser, there’s a ruined pagoda in a jungle where
Palmer witnesses a scene from Shadows
(inspired by David Bowie’s film The Man
Who fell to Earth) and a Baron Parfizal-like character runs the city’s only
blues and jazz club. The city has become a Zen-like stage where characters
could enter and play their part.
The title of the book and narrative style underwent all sorts of changes.
The book started life as Call Bangkok
1313 then Palmer’s Gone East
before I finally settled on Zen City, Iso.
I chose Zen City rather than Bangkok to
distance the novel from conventional Thai crime fiction, signal that the city is
more than just a forties reconstruction and to highlight the Buddhist teachings
underpinning the story. Iso comes
from the Isetta Iso, that sleek little Italian bubble car Palmer covets. Another
important evolution was the narrative itself. Initially, it was written in an
incredibly sparse way without quotations marks in the style of Cormac McCarthy.
However, I later changed this into a more accessible, conventional style
although I retained the use of a first-person narrative to really draw in the reader.
And that is the story behind Zen
City, Iso. Like my first full-length novel it’s been another amazing
journey with plenty of surprises along the way and I’m really passionate about
it. Honestly, I don’t know whether the novel will sell or not but I do know there’s
nothing quite like it out there. As Orson Palmer said, “No one is more
surprised than me.”
