Hong Kong Noir

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Fourteen.

That number is about as bad as it gets in Hong Kong. Pronounced “sup say” in Cantonese, the city’s lingua franca, the ominous word sounds like “sut say” — which means certain death. It is so universally avoided that buildings have no fourteenth floor and people stay clear of cell phone numbers, license plates, and hotel rooms with that inauspicious combination of digits. Think about the myth surrounding unlucky thirteen in the West, amplify that a thousand times, and you’ll start to get the idea.

So when Akashic Books suggested that we put together fourteen stories for a Hong Kong noir volume, we cringed. Choy! as older folks in Hong Kong like to say when they hear something sacrilegious, before they spit on the floor and shoot the offender a dirty look.

Then it clicked. Of course. It has to be. What would the city’s first noir volume be without the most forbidding of all numbers? A collection of dark tales set in Hong Kong must have fourteen stories — no fewer and no more. Call it foresight or blind luck, the publisher had gotten it dead right.

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