A shaky introduction to a solid antihero

Spirit House
By Christopher G. Moore
Grove, 304 pp., paperback, $13

Last year, American crime-fiction enthusiasts were treated to a new and intriguing voice, that of the hardboiled detective created by Christopher G. Moore. Moore's novel "The Risk of Infidelity Index" introduced US audiences to Vincent Calvino, a disbarred New York lawyer scraping by in Bangkok as a private investigator. Grim, violent, and saturated in details of Bangkok’s underworld, "The Risk of Infidelity Index" reimagined the loner PI as perfect expat, knowledgeable about the Bangkok bars and sex clubs but still Western enough to explain the local customs to readers. When high-powered businessmen started to die, and their worried widows banded together, Calvino found a middle ground - partly legal, partly not, partly Thai, partly not - that solved the mystery.

This fall, Grove, Moore's US publisher, has backtracked, bringing out "Spirit House," the first of the nine Calvino novels originally published in Thailand, where Moore lives. This series debut gives us a first sighting of Moore’s sodden antihero, whom we meet as he's having a nightmare. In his sweat-soaked sleep, Calvino is at one of his adopted city's seedier bars. One of the sex workers there begins an impromptu exhibition with an eel but, in the manner of a dream, the private investigator is distracted by a dead body lying on the bar. As the bar owner begins feeding pieces of the corpse to some caged bats, Calvino wakes up to find himself in his own Bangkok apartment, watching a gecko eating a cockroach and a prostitute holding a gun on him. That's a bang-up opening for any book, and sets the tone for this series right from the start.

But if "Spirit House" has the sex- and action-packed plot down pat, kicking off with a murder that couldn't have been committed by the young paintthinner addict who has been arrested, it also reveals an author who hasn't yet found his voice. Whereas "Infidelity Index" presents a self-assured writer who has hit his stride, "Spirit House" weaves back and forth. The overabundance of images has men, for example, "washed ashore like discarded whiskey bottles . . . bragging about what they had consumed at their last sexual buffet." While these mixed metaphors and the accompanying purple prose fade somewhat as the book continues, they reveal a deeper problem with Calvino's identity.

Unlike in the later work, in "Spirit House" Moore, and thus Calvino, seems torn between objectifying the bar girls as predatory creatures and identifying with them as fellow travelers, trying to get by. While his later adventures take the nightlife in stride, in "Spirit House" Moore seems like he's trying to shock us. He shows us the sex acts, but his character hasn't gotten past the display to the desperation or even workaday boredom of the gig. And so when a murder victim is revealed to have kept a tawdry account book of bar girls and their services, the supposedly jaded Calvino's distaste seems feigned. "In Bangkok, there was nothing odd about a guy who had never had success with women in the West keeping a complete report on the sexual preferences of Thai teenaged women he bought out of the bars," Calvino comments. The description could almost fit him as well.

While the exotic setting will lure readers, it might make sense to wait for reissues of the later books. Or look for John Burdett's wonderful series, starting with "Bangkok Eight." In those books, Burdett captures the underworld and the spiritual life of Thailand as well, for a much more engrossing experience.

Clea Simon is a freelance writer and the author of "Cries and Whiskers" (Poisoned Pen Press).