RARA-AVIS: Vietnam Noir

From: Editorial HLP (heavenlake77@yahoo.com)
Date: 06 Aug 2009

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    I’ve been following a number of threads for some weeks and thought it was time to make an introduction. My name is Christopher G. Moore and I write a PI series set in Southeast Asia.

     

    In the early-90s I spent six weeks a year over a five-year period working in Saigon. The experience I picked up formed the basis for Comfort Zone, the fourth novel, in the Vincent Calvino private eye series. The early 90s was a time of uncertainty and the economic system like the infrastructure was wrecked after years of war. The American embargo hadn’t been lifted. People floated around in rags, begging in the streets. If noir means a kind of darkness from which there is little possibility of escape, what I found in Vietnam during that time matched that definition. I talked with a fair number of Vietnam veterans passing through Vietnam and Thailand over that period and most of them were having trouble escaping from the ghosts of their recent past.  

          

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