Anderson yells at Hock Seng over the loss of their equipment at the airfield because somehow Jaidee's douchey behavior is the fault of his employee. Something about not paying bribes. Hock Seng continues to be a conniving jackass. Dog Fucker takes Hock Seng to meet the Dung Lord, a Thai with influence of some sort. The Dung Lord made it possible for the Chinese Malayan refugees to be in Thailand in the first place. Hock Seng offers him a deal; stolen kink spring wonder formula (from that danged safe) for a ship to restart his trade empire. Yeah, everything is run by spring. You wind them up and get power from the conversion of "calories to joules". Algea is involved in some way.
It turns out Hock Seng murdered the yellow card who had the factory job before him. "You were starving. There was no other way. p.136. Really? I guess I'll just have to take your word for it considering we're never shown anything to support or refute your rather hysterical claim. This is a problem with the book in general. Paolo isn't very good at showing. He says the food supply is decimated, people starve, the world is in turmoil but all he shows us is people eating. Coffee, whiskey, noodles, rice, crab, laab mu, gaeng gai, salad, gaeng kiew wan, octopus, "markets full of vegetables", snack sellers, som tam, nam plaa prik, chile-laden pork, bamboo tips, rice beer. These and other references are scattered throughout the text. Nobody is shown having difficulty getting food. This gives the impression that people are indeed getting enough to eat. The same with the yellow cards. Yeah, we take a walk with Hock Seng through the slums but we don't see much more than a depressed area with people going about their daily lives, not well-off but getting along. You say they're all on the edge but I'm not convinced. Also, this book is boring and soulless.
In other news I just finished Murder at the Savoy by Wahloo and Sjowall.
I liked this book like I've enjoyed the other ones but the ending and moral was a bit odd.
A businessman named Palmgren is murdered by a man who calmly walked into a hotel dining room, shot his victim, and then escaped through a window. Investigations show that Palmgren was kind of a jackass (to put it mildly) when it comes to his business dealings. He trades in arms with African dictators (this book came out in the early '70s), he ruthlessly managed his factories by closing down nonproductive ones rather than retooling them, and he was also a slum lord. Possibly. There wasn't much description of the conditions his tenants lived in actually.
Anyway, to give away the plot of the book, it turns out he was shot by a former office worker in a factory that was shut down two years before. The man took to drinking and started getting into fights with his wife. The building manager reported him to various civic authorities for noise violations and possible child endangerment and he was brought before the temperance board several times for his drinking. Times had changed since he'd gotten his office job 12 years before and he no longer had the training to get a "real job", as his wife puts it. Which means he was turning down jobs he thought were beneath him rather than taking one and getting the training he needed to find something better.
The building manager (this is a Palmgren owned building where factory workers were housed) eventually evicts him. (The detectives speculate that there was a conspiracy headed by Palmgren to get him out so the apartment could be rented out at a higher price. No facts towards this but...no facts towards this.) His wife (described as slovenly and wearing sleazy clothing) separates from him and he gets a lower paying job in another town. Because he obviously has no part in his downward trend (you know, the drinking, the spurning lower paying jobs, the fights, the fact that yes, drunken, argumentative daddy is not good for the kiddies) he's pitied by the detectives who muse how terrible it is that Palmgren's cronies will go on business as usual while this poor, battered man will spend the best years of his life in prison. The main character Martin Beck muses that nobody will miss Palmgren and that he hopes the murderer will get off lightly in his sentencing.
Bull. Shit. I don't care that Palmgren is a jackoff who (inadvertently) helped ruin this guy's life. I hate having to harp on the idea of responsibility and agency but really. The murderer contributed to his own downfall. He did not deal with his misfortunes well. The idea that the taking of a human life is not a tragedy because nobody will miss them is disgusting and more than a little disturbing. Yes, Palmgren is not a good man but that doesn't give anybody the right to decide that he doesn't get to exist any longer. I would argue that killing him is a far worse crime than shutting down a non-productive factory and having a building manager that doesn't like your face. I really hope nobody would argue me on this point but apparently '70s Wahloo and Sjowall would.
The introduction says that this book displays the ugly side of the left at the time and I have to agree. Capitalist business practices can be ugly (especially when gone to the extremes as they have in this book. I mean, gun running?) but what's presented here is only one side and I would still say that cold-blooded murder is worse for society.
Whew. It was a good book. The moral just bothered me a little.
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