There are a number of authors who perilously straddle the line between the crime genre and literary fiction. They avoid easy genre definition and are often read more by contemporary fiction fans than diehard crime readers. It’s often simply a matter of bookshop shelving where they end up. Many combine their stories with great locations – crimes occur, but they’re not always the central theme of the book. Choice, loyalty, compulsion, serendipity, history, all play major roles. Think Patricia Highsmith’s Tunisia-set The Tremor of Forgery, or The Price of Salt (latterly titled Carol); perhaps Dorothy B Hughes’s Manhattan-set The So Blue Marble, or her intense trip to the New Mexico desert in The Blackbirder. Consider just about everything written by Graham Greene from razor gangs in ‘30s Brighton to spooks in ‘50s Saigon.
This is also the literary intersection where you will invariably find the British-born, Bangkok-based writer Lawrence Osborne. Whether his stories are set in Macao’s casinos, the luxury Greek island of Hydra, up in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains amongst the privileged expats, or inside an exclusive Bangkok apartment building, there are always elements of crime, but they’re not necessarily (and indeed rarely) the whole, or even the main, story. Others must have spotted this criminal interest too – Osborne was asked by the Chandler estate to contribute a new Marlowe novel. So no escaping the crime genre there – Osborne’s Marlowe tribute Only to Sleep came out in 2018.
Now he has a new collection of short fiction out – Burning Angel and Other Stories – and many of them criss-cross his familiar no-man’s land between literary fiction and the crime genre. So…no more speculation, let’s ask the man himself what he’s up to.
Paul French: Most of your novels have crimes in them – a hit-and-run in the North African desert in The Forgiven, stolen cash in Macao in The Ballad of a Small Player, and then again in Bangkok in The Glass Kingdom. I could go on…but though crimes can often initially seem central to your novels yet they never feel like “crime books”. It’s as if the specific crime is more often just another character trait, like being rich, a philanderer, or drinking too much. How do you see the relationship between crime and your characters?
Lawrence Osborne: You could say, as I sometimes do to myself, that criminality is the one eternal feature of human nature, along with altruism and love. As long as humans exist, so will crime. I think this was Dostoevsky’s reason for being so obsessed with it, and later it was Simenon’s: two writers that shadow me at all times! Most crime novels, though, are too obvious and they have too simple a view of good and evil, insofar as usually we always know who is who. Is one ever truly surprised by who the villain turns out to be in a Scandi-noir or an Agatha Christie? It’s a parlor game that doesn’t upset our moral paradigm. Whereas in Highsmith or Simenon the characters simply do things out of the blue because they are ruled by enigmatic pathologies. It’s human nature that is the issue, not literary crime plots.
Paul French: So many of your main characters (and a fair few minor ones too) are, if not outright criminal, then at least morally dubious in their actions and decisions. You’re drawn to questions of morality right? To admit your transgressions and crimes or not to? To accept that there is always price to pay at some point (I don’t think anyone ever gets away totally scot-free)?
Lawrence Osborne: To continue this line of thought, it’s a question of why human beings do what they do. Now, it’s my personal understanding that they are more like flocks of birds changing direction in mid-flight than they are like airline pilots rationally performing a safe landing. Perhaps this is taking people at their most extreme – but after all it’s the extremes that are interesting to a novelist or a film maker. One of the stories, both Du Maurier’s tale and Hitchcock’s film, that fascinated me when I was very young was The Birds. Why? Because birds don’t have a moral sense that humans can appeal against. They are driven to change their behaviour by things that are totally beyond our understanding. When they decide to kill you, they just do it. But the implication, I think, is that humans are much the same.
Paul French: Let’s turn to Burning Angel and Other Stories. Again, crimes are occurring in most, if not all, of these stories. The first, Ghost, which I guess could qualify as a novella, brilliantly evokes the over-paid, hyper-egoistic ex-pat banker world of Hong Kong. Yet when the party stops, your character Buford has little option but to sink, seemingly obliviously, into a criminal enterprise that can make use of his western looks and gullible ways (really his only “skills”). Thinking again of where crime and morality intersect it seems Buford, of course already in the eyes of some a criminal as an uncaring banker, slips into a more obvious con because he lacks morals rather than being innately criminally minded. It’s a grey area right?
Lawrence Osborne: Yes, as in all spy novels, by the way. When states wage grey area warfare against each other you get the territory of le Carré. Mere individuals get swept up in their own disasters first, then they are used as pawns to advance a larger political purpose over which they have no control. The powerful can always use personal failure to “turn” people. Of course, in light of my comments above, one might also ask how conscious or meaningful those state actors are as well. Are they not also driven by irrational, blind impulses?
Paul French: Crime novels, TV shows, movies are full of the ‘you can run from your past, but you can’t hide’ trope. You play with that interestingly in the story Blood Eclipse. A psychiatrist with a hidden past, a strange claustrophobic rural community in northern England, and a teenage patient that appears perhaps schizophrenic or is maybe what we used to call an idiot savant (I’m sure there’s a new-fangled term for that now) and also has her own past secrets. I think this tale highlights your interest in mysterious pasts – Robert in your Cambodian-set novel Hunters in the Dark or Lord Doyle in The Ballad of a Small Player ditching England for Asia, or Sarah in The Glass Kingdom fleeing her past in Manhattan for anonymous Bangkok. Even, to those around him, the aging Marlowe is a figure not keen to discuss his past in “retirement” down in 80s Baja California in Only to Sleep. Am I reading too much into all this hidden pasts interest?
Lawrence Osborne: No, I am indeed fascinated by this aspect of people. Have you ever seen the 2012 Korean film Helpless (Hwa-cha, 2012) by the director Byun Young-joo and based on the Japanese novel All She Was Worth by Miyabe Miyuki (aka Kasha, 1992)? Well, it’s a masterpiece of the genre. A woman abandons her fiancé in a gas station and disappears – and he is left to piece together a sordid past. There’s something in that film that I never tire of. One might argue that escaping one’s present life is a basic human instinct – for some anyway. But it’s a common fantasy. It’s like the British BBC TV series from the 70’s, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. If, as TS Eliot said, most people lead lives of quiet desperation, then there is perhaps little to be surprised by.
Paul French: Privilege seems to invariably lead to crime in your work. Almost as if the luck and the benefits of privilege can only be had and momentarily enjoyed if there is a criminal element to bring it all tumbling down. Of course the wealthy David and Jo Henniger heading to an extravagant party in the Moroccan hinterlands in The Forgiven leave the scene of a hit-and-run and their lives subsequently spiral out of control. The privileged rich kids Samantha and Naomi in Beautiful Animals try to do a good thing for a washed-up migrant on Hydra, but it doesn’t go to plan (to say the least). In the story Volcano in your new collection the wealthy divorcee Martha heads to a new age retreat in Hawaii which turns decidedly strange. You seem to be suggesting that wealth and privilege are fine, but that there’s always a price to be paid and privilege is fleeting?
Lawrence Osborne: This is perhaps my Old Testament side coming out! In reality, the more terrifying scenario is that there is no price to be paid at all, that it’s all arbitrary. It’s perhaps a little too easy to scourge the rich and powerful, as we all like to do – until that fine day when wealth and power are accorded to us. Such is human nature. But I would say that privilege does tend to make people careless, as it were – careless of other people. I load that word up to the maximum. Such is also human nature and it will never change.
Paul French: The story that gives the collection its title, Burning Angel, again effectively a novella, is one that offers someone a moral choice. They can choose to be honest, confess, admit, and take their punishment, or they can try to cover it up and inevitably make it worse by committing criminal acts. David Henniger could have stopped the car that night in the desert, Sarah could have admitted stealing the money in New York and not fled to Thailand, in Hunters in the Dark, Robert could make other choices as he crossed from Thailand to Cambodia. But, of course, each choose to run, to evade their actions. And so similarly with successful New York architect Edward Munroe in Burning Angel – he makes a fateful decision to cover up a transgression in order to try and retain his wealthy and privileged Manhattan life. Of course his choice has consequences. When I read your work I often think that our lives are so often dependent on one decision, made in haste, maybe not even at that time seeming that momentous, but usually wrong and, despite what the therapists say, we don’t get second chances. Agree or disagree: discuss?
Lawrence Osborne: I must agree, and I think it’s true that we rarely get a second chance. This is why people in a jam will become ruthless in making sure that their fatal error is not discovered. Past a certain point, it becomes too late to turn back or to rectify their initial stupidity, or cupidity. And so, in Burning Angel, a bland or right-thinking but spoiled architect cannot admit his transgression with a deaf maid – and thinks it better to contrive a forced abortion. It’s my definition of a nightmare, which is why I made that story so long, in effect a novella as you say.
Paul French: And finally, as with previous books, Burning Angel is covered in great blurbs likening your work to Highsmith, Greene, and others. You’ve been asked to contribute to the Chandler canon as well. But that’s just reviewers, which is all well and good but who do you read and reread? You’ve mentioned Dostoevsky and Simenon, but who else makes the cut?
Lawrence Osborne: One does get a bit burdened by these labels, which are nothing to do with me! I read and reread Scott Fitzgerald, especially Tender is the Night, and of course Du Maurier, Paul Bowles and le Carré, about whom I am writing an essay for the Bodleian Library right now. I suppose if I am lucky, might eventually get my own adjective – but it will take a while.
