Eclectic Representations Vol.4, Issue 1 – July 2014| 9 Writing the City into Being: Cold War Bangkok in The Ninth Directive (1966) - Alexander Klemm * Abstract: This paper presents an analysis of the novel The Ninth Directive (1966) by British author Elleston Trevor (a.k.a. Adam Hall) by focusing on its historical and literary contexts and on the construction of Bangkok as an urban stage of Cold War clashes between British, U.S. American and Chinese interests. The paper seeks to determine exactly how Bangkok is portrayed in the novel and to what ends. The theoretical framework is based on various recent publications that deal with the representation of Bangkok and Thailand in western fiction and non-fiction texts. The results show that The Ninth Directive fits some characteristics of the city novel genre, yet it does not fully develop Bangkok into a character of its own right because the primary purpose is to present Bangkok as a strategic center from where the western and Thai forces succeed at stopping the spread of Chinese Communism. This representation is solely based on the observations of the British agent Quiller, the protagonist. At first, the city is portrayed as an idyllic paradise before it is turned into a city under siege. Moreover, the author’ s imagined Cold W ar confrontation reveals his underlying Orientalist, colonial and imperial attitudes, which are most apparent in the portrayal of the antagonist. Named ‘ Kuo the Mongolian’, the Chinese-Communist assassin Kuo embodies western fears of a rising China and the spread of Communism. Keywords: Bangkok, Cold W ar, city, fiction, representation, Orientalism 1. Introduction During my research about the numerous ways in which post-World War II English-language novels have appropriated and represented Bangkok, I could not find any critical texts of note that have engaged with this topic. This may be due to an apparent lack of ‘serious’ western novels set in Bangkok, or an ostensibly more fruitful focus on colonial and post- colonial literature set in other Southeast Asian cities. * Graduate School of English, Assumption University of Thailand, Bangkok. Email: aklemm@au.edu © 2014 Eclectic Representations ISSN 2231 – 430X print