Singapore Slings, Peanut Shells and Singapore Crime Fiction

Ovidia--every other Tuesday

I’ve been working on a piece about Singapore crime fiction for an encyclopedia of Global Crime Fiction and it's driving home to me how little I know on the subject. Plus I have to admit that none of my current 'fun' reading books originated here in Singapore.

One is A Quiet Place by Seicho Matsumoto. The other is a slim German for beginners krimi, Die Dritte Hand. But I do have an excuse--we read to get encounter broader experiences, so I'm getting to visit Japan and Germany in my down time.

But it feels a bit like betrayal because there are local books I haven't yet read... which is a huge change from how it was forty years ago when I started writing. In those days I didn't just read pretty much all the locally published (in English) books, I believe I attended most of the book launches or at least spoke to the authors!

And maybe it's a great, glorious thing that my reading can no longer keep up!

But what is Singapore crime fiction?

It made me think about what we tell visitors who ask about 'real Singapore food'.
We bring them for a Singapore Sling at the Raffles Hotel and introduce them to yellow chicken curry or Nonya laksa.
But what do we eat when left to ourselves?
Something like prata for breakfast, maybe Mala hotpot on a rainy day like today and some sushi or ramen for dinner; food that was originally Indian, Chinese, Japanese, but tweaked to please local tastes and a big part of our lives here.

And maybe our reading habits evolved much the same way.

Because if I’m honest, my reading taste—especially when it comes to my beloved mysteries—was formed by books from our former colonial masters. And after getting hooked on glorious British golden age mystery sleuths I met Americans like Nero Wolfe and Ellery Queen and there was no looking back.
They still remain the chicken rice and satay of my writing, even as Indian, Japanese and Scandinavian sleuths have become part of regular reading life and I suspect I’m not alone.

All of which just adds to the difficulty of figuring out if there's really such a thing as authentic “Singapore crime fiction”?

Singapore's often described as one of the safest cities in the world,thanks to low crime, strong laws, hyper efficient policing and internalised social order. Not the most obvious breeding ground for murder and mystery.

But we have Shamini Flint’s Inspector Singh--grumpy, overweight but persistently effective. And the wildly successful Sherlock Sam series by A.J. Low (yes I know they're for younger readers but I still like them!)

While these books clearly fit into global crime traditions, they are clearly rooted in Singapore's characters, food, language and geography.

In Singapore we automatically switch between languages, registers, social settings and religious sensibilities on a daily basis. We read Richard Osman, Vaseem Khan and Uketsu, watch The Frog and Mercy for None (Korean thrillers) on Netflix and and scroll through American true crime/ news reports, on an island that's very different (at least on the surface) from the realities they present.

And, perhaps most importantly, we absorb, adapt and rework what comes in.
That's what I'm hoping to do with my own crime fiction, now that literature ('Poetry' in LKY's words) is no longer a luxury we cannot afford.

Think of it as having a Singapore Sling at the Raffles Hotel. Not even the most 'authentic' Singaporean does that on a weekly or monthly basis, but it's nice knowing there's a space here where you can drink, tell tall tales and crush peanut shells underfoot without getting fined.