The Noir side of the Bangkok Night has always been one of its most delicious ingredients, kind of like that extra special secret sauce that makes the first taste of a Thai gourmet feast so exciting and interesting. Without the Noir and the nightlife, the bargirls, punters, ladyboys, rentboys and thousands of service staff, the assorted cast of thugs, scammers, traffickers, dealers, perverts, hitmen and the endless stream of fugitives from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North America, not to mention from Thailand itself, without this glorious and colorful assortment of Noir characters and faces and posturing, the Bangkok Night would no longer be so spicy, colorful and fun.
But then, as if that wasn’t enough, blend into Bangkok’s actual Noir, the delicious artistic and fictional noir found in the Bangkok novels of Christopher G. Moore, Stephen Leather, John Burdett and Jake Needham, in the Thai gangster films like the original Pang Brothers’ BANGKOK DANGEROUS (not the remake which turned out to be a marshmallow), in the edgy hip-hop soundtrack of Thaitanium and in my own series of Bangkok Noir paintings and portraits, you get an explosion of Noir, beautiful and frightening and thrilling all at once, making the Noir side of Bangkok a sparkling treasure to be savored and cherished, even if not actually consumed.
