The Bangkok Girl (A Lee Jenson Novel) by Sean O'Leary; One Crime in Bangkok Makes a Neo-Noir Rumble
By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: With apologies to Tim Rice, Bjorn Ulvaeus, and Benny Anderssen, I couldn’t resist the paraphrase of “One Night in Bangkok.” I also apologize for the earworm. I am suffering for it, believe me.
When it comes to settings in Mysteries and Thrillers, Bangkok is a likely one if the mystery involves the sex tourism industry. It’s like New Orleans for Supernatural Horror, or DC for political crimes, New York for organized crime, or LA involving celebrity crimes. There are just some places on Earth which are practically short hand tropes, almost cliches, for certain types of crimes and conflicts that the reader will encounter. Bangkok with its reputation for a decadent night life, loose enforcement, stigmatization, and ambiguous distinction of the definitions of sex crimes is just the right place if the crime involves sexual assault, human trafficking, and forced sex work. That’s what Lee Jenson, private investigator is faced with in Sean O’Leary’s The Bangkok Girl. It is a modern day Neo-Noir Crime novel with its seedy location, troubled detective, ineffective or corrupt authority, powerful dangerous men and women in suits, and innocents who get swept up in the night life that destroys them.
Lee is a private investigator exiled from his native country, Australia and has settled in Thailand. He enjoys the roguish atmosphere and he gets plenty of assignments so he’s never bored. He receives a call from a potential client who is looking for his missing daughter. It seems Zoe Burgess, the young woman, worked as a jazz singer in various clubs around Sydney, Singapore, Bangkok, and Tokyo. However, she is missing and her parents are determined to find her. While Lee investigates Zoe’s trail with the help of his assistant/photographer/martial artist, Kanika, Lee learns that the poor girl did more than play special song requests. She was kidnapped, trafficked, drugged, and forced into sex work. Now Lee has to find her while facing the Yakuza, who have very powerful connections that have spread through various cities and countries and don’t like this detective nosing in on their business.
There is definitely a sense of the old hard boiled detective noir books in The Bangkok Girl. It’s a subgenre that reminds Readers that the world is a dark cynical place and is full of soulless people who will corrupt, destroy, dominate, and murder others for money, position, or just for the Hell of it. There are places and people that practically thrive on that environment and rely on it to survive.
The settings in the book, particularly Bangkok, are shaped by that dark cynicism in O’Leary’s world. Lee goes through various nightclubs, encounters many unsavory characters sometimes using bribery and force to get information. In fact, the first few pages feature a fight between Lee and two enforcers that have nothing to do with the main case. Instead, the conflict is looked on as another day on the job in Bangkok.
Along with crime, xenophobia and ethnocentrism is a presence throughout O’Leary’s book. As Lee investigates Zoe’s disappearance, he learns that there are clubs in which he is forbidden to enter because he is looked upon as a foreigner. In a homogenous Asian country whose residents consider one ethnicity or country of origin to be superior to others, someone like Lee is looked on as the minority.
Keep in mind, this is the type of environment in which organized crime thrives. People with big ideas, fancy suits, and a charismatic style that draws law abiding citizens who are suspicious of local authority and The System. (Remember the opening scene in The Godfather with Bonasara, the undertaker’s “I Believe in America” speech? It’s like that). These people claim to be the spokesperson of their particular ethnic group playing on their fears, insecurities, and paranoia of those that are different from them against a status quo that often struck back and minimized them first.
So of course The Yakuza would have a hand in this with their control with money, influence, threats, intimidation, and abuse. The Yakuza members, particularly one Hiro Kawasaki, have such a presence in the book. He is magnetic and cutthroat, the type that may invite you to his fancy private rooms but leaves his target uncertain whether he is going to sleep with them, shoot them, or both. The people surrounding him are both drawn to and are in fear of him so he is able to get away with a lot.
Hiro has plenty of influence that allows him to practice his criminal acts and plenty of informers, like one who befriends women so they can then traffic them. Hiro has so much power and authority that there really is only one way to remove him. Even that won’t work, because there will always be another Hiro waiting to take his place.
Besides the crime element, that bitter cynicism can also be found within its protagonist. Lee has his own issues to work out. His exile from Australia is dubious and only hinted at but suggests that he committed some violent acts, suffered personal and professional trauma, and may have earned the ire of more than a few in charge.
Lee is the right person to travel into such dark corners because he is as dark as they are, sometimes darker. He often has to rely on the assistance of others like Kanika, who is a sardonic but observant aide, to go inside places that he, a white man, can’t always enter. But he has the mindset to put those connections and clues together to make a whole picture.
Lee knows this world because he has to live it, not just because of his job but because it’s in his body and mind. He is Schizophrenic and relies on meds to keep his hallucinations and delusions at bay. At times this makes him vulnerable in certain situations.
In some very eerie chapters, Lee is kidnapped by the Yakuza and is deprived of his medications. Surrounded by the enemies that he is supposed to face for Zoe’s life, he is consumed by the enemies in his mind that threatens to destroy and annihilate him from within.
