Penang and George Town: Scandals in Paradise

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Beautiful Penang, on the northwest coast of Peninsular Malaysia, by the Malacca Strait. Its densely populated capital of George Town is a feast of colours and heritage buildings. If geography is destiny then Penang and George Town are evidence of the theory – deemed vital to the East India Company, the navies of a half dozen colonial countries and any number of pirates. The Straits of Malacca remain one of the world’s key waterways, linking east and west, but also one of the most pirate infested too. It’s had some interesting visitors over the years too.

Penang-born Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors (2023) is set in 1921 and mixes real and fictional characters and events. Penang-born Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer, and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the (as it was known then) Straits Settlement of Penang. At the same time Chinese revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat-sen is in town. When “Willie” Somerset Maugham visits (and of course Maugham was well known for his tales of colonial Malaysia) everyone’s life is thrown into upset. Not least because Maugham, always on the hunt for his next story, senses scandal — the trial of an Englishwoman charged with murder. Will the colonial authorities hang a white woman?

Maugham’s tales of scandal in Malaysia are in several of his short story collections, especially his collection The Casuarina Tree (1926). Class divisions, racial tensions, adultery, and most other failings of human nature are abundant. The most famous story in the collection is “The Letter” where a lawyer, Joyce, is called on to defend Leslie Crosbie, a planter’s wife who is arrested after shooting Geoffrey Hammond, a neighbor (and perhaps lover), in her home in Malaya while her husband is away. Tan Twan Eng skilfully weaves elements of this case into his novel which, by the way, was a movie in 1940 with Bette Davis, while the real case is told in Eric Lawlor’s Murder on the Verandah: Love and Betrayal in British Malaya (1999). The story Lawlor recounts has even more surprise twists than Maugham’s short story. The case also appears in Martin Vengadesan and Andrew Sagayam’s Malaysian Murders and Mysteries: A Century of Shocking Cases that Gripped the Nation (2020).

And while we’re talking true crime. If you want to know what goes on in Penang after dark and out of view of the good decent citizens of George Town then Ewe Paik Leong, a Malaysian author living in Kuala Lumpur, has written Penang Undercover (2019) — sex industry workers, mamasans, and bargirls in George Town’s bars, Penang’s grifting trishaw riders, happy-ending massages that don’t end all that happy for conned and cheated tourists. To be sure a tad sensationalist but usually with a wry and witty eye on events. 

More up to date is Trevor Pearson’s Murder in Penang (2022) set among a group of heavy drinking, football crazy ex-pats. There’s a dangerous bet and much disloyalty and lack of trust among the group to work out the mystery. Then there’s Grace McClurg’s Straits and Narrow (2008, and as in the Malacca Straits) which sees Rachel Carson, a forensic psychologist, on a tour of Southeast Asia, up in a murder that causes her to question here career choice. The novel bounces between Penang and nearby Singapore (the two ends of the Malacca Straits). McClurg is a criminal psychologist working in Singapore. 

On the more cozy sides of things is Elaine K Collier’s A Malaysian Misdemeanour (2023), the third book in her Innocents Abroad Crime series. Donna and Fiona are enjoying a little spiritual culture in southeast Asia but find themselves left alone with a 6-year-old boy after his parents and two diving instructors disappear from a diving platform off the coast of Penang. It’s a mystery that starts in Penang and ends up in Singapore. By the way, other books in the series hit the Greek Islands and Sardinia. 

And finally, something a little different. There’s a long tradition of ghost stories in Malay culture and so it’s perhaps not surprising that some authors have chosen to mash up the ghost and crime genres together to see what they get. English author Murray Bailey’s Singapore Ghost (2021) introduces Ash Carter, in Penang babysitting a newspaper reporter investigating ghost stories. Things turned deadly and the novel bounces between Penang and Singapore as Carter finds himself on the wrong side of a Chinese Secret Society and its leader, Chen Guan Xi. Bailey’s Ash Carter series is apparently inspired by his father’s experience in the Royal Military Police in Singapore in the early 1950s.

 Far lighter, and of interest perhaps to Young Adult readers is Penang Pixie (2019), the third book in the Southeast Asia Paranormal Police Department series by John P Logsdon and Noah K Sturdevant. It’s a complicated series for those not completely au fait with the world of investigating wizards, demons, and warlocks! Officer Mark Vedis is in charge of a special operations group in the Southeast Asia Paranormal Police Department (PPD). The post was awarded after an incident in the Kansas City PPD that caused him to merge with a demon. That turned him into the first warlock in existence for a long time. the series ranges across Southeast and East Asia – Bangkok, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, and Penang. And in Penang apparently are the Shadow Five, a supernatural mafia that doesn’t take prisoners. There’s clues, mysteries and action and it’s been a popular series in Asia. 

And so Penang joins the (ever growing) list of seemingly idyllic island locations – the Greek Islands, the Scottish far north islands, the Maldives – we’ve covered in Crime and the City that – guess what! – turn out to be dangerous as hell! But don’t let that put you off – George Town and Penang really are delightful.

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