Singapore Noir

Singapore in recent years has been in the spotlight once again — this time for its “tiger” economy, one that has made this 250-square-mile country one of the wealthiest in the world. (According to a 2013 Wall Street Journal story, the country had 188,000 millionaire households in 2011 — which translates into one in six homes having disposable private wealth of at least one million dollars.) It has become one of the major safe havens for the rich to park their wealth; Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin made international headlines in 2012 when he renounced his US citizenship and became Singaporean. The country now boasts a bar that sells a $26,000 cocktail.

Despite recent changes, Singapore is still an Asian polyglot — its five million population is about 75 percent Chinese in ethnicity, 13 percent Malay, 8 percent Indian, among others, which is what accounts for its distinct patois, Singlish. You’ll see some of it in the stories before you — this local pidgin is a combination of English, Malay, and a hodge-podge of Chinese dialects. Conversations may sound bizarre sometimes because although the words are in English, the sentence structure used may be Malay or Mandarin. The word lah is tacked onto most sentences for inflection — something like okay or man in American slang.

And its stories remain. The rich stories that attracted literary lions W. Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling to hold court at the Raffles Hotel (where the Singapore Sling was created) are still sprinkled throughout its neighborhoods. And in the following pages, you’ll get the chance to discover some of them.

British novelist Lawrence Osborne takes us along on a romantic, sinister romp in Geylang, while mystery writer extraordinaire S.J. Rozan explores the darkness that lurks in the cookie-cutter blandness of suburban expat Singapore. Hong Kong — based Nury Vittachi, creator of the Feng Shui Detective series, gives us a breathless fast-paced chase along glitzy Orchard Road, and American food writer Monica Bhide, in her fiction debut, weaves a heart-tugging tale of a boy and his mother.

You’ll find stories from some of the best contemporary writers in Singapore — three of them winners of the Singapore Literature Prize, essentially the country’s Pulitzer: Simon Tay, writing as Donald Tee Quee Ho, tells the story of a hardboiled detective who inadvertently wends his way into the underbelly of organized crime, Colin Cheong shows us a surprising side to the country’s ubiquitous cheerful “taxi uncle,” while Suchen Christine Lim spins a wistful tale of a Chinese temple medium whose past resurges to haunt her.

Colin Goh, a beloved Singaporean satirist, filmmaker, and cartoonist, delves into the seedy side of Raffles Place, the country’s deep-pocketed financial district, while award-winning playwright Damon Chua gives us a tour of life after dark near the Malaysian border. Maids — who regularly make the news in Singapore due to reports of abominable maid abuse — are the protagonists in stories by Dave Chua and Johann S. Lee, one of Singapore’s first openly gay writers.

Black magic is threaded through the yarn by Ovidia Yu, one of Singapore’s leading and most prolific playwrights. And, of course, the enigmatic female figure, so alluring and so irresistible, is the key in Philip Jeyaretnam’s elegant story. As for mine, I chose a setting close to my heart — the kelongs, or old fisheries on stilts, that once dotted the waters of Singapore but are gradually disappearing.

I have a deep sense of romance about these kelongs

, along with the many other settings, characters, nuances, and quirks that you’ll see in these stories. They’re intense, inky, nebulous. There is evil, sadness, a foreboding. And liars, cheaters, the valiant abound.

This is a Singapore rarely explored in Western literature — until now. No Disneyland here; but there is a death penalty.

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

March 2014

Part I

Sirens

Last Time

by Colin Goh

Raffles Place

Last time.

That’s how Singaporeans say both “on a previous occasion” and “in the old days.” As in, “Last time I saw her, she was wearing an emerald-green Moschino dress that accentuated her clavicle,” as well as, “Last time, Singapore lawyers also used to wear wigs.”

There’s a photo of me wearing a wig on my desk at the firm. It’s made of white horsehair, fringed with several rows of frizzy curls (the wig, not the photo). I’m also wearing a black robe with wide, open sleeves and a sort of flap over the left shoulder, the garb of an English barrister.

It’s made by Ede & Ravenscroft, I said, handing her her tea. They’re the queen’s robe makers.

“You graduated in England?” She blew lightly on the tea before taking a sip. I’d left the door of my office open and could feel the eyes of the rest of the firm searing into the back of my neck.