In Heinlein’s Glory Road, the protagonist finds himself in Singapore, which he describes as “one of the Seven Sinful Cities where anything can be had.” He didn’t list the other six, and I am not familiar enough with organized vice (or disorganized vice, for that matter) to be able to fill in the blanks.
So: What are the Seven Sinful Cities? The cities where, if you put a foot wrong, you will wind up in a back alley, beaten, robbed, drugged, and sold into slavery in a brothel?
While you can probably find anything in Salt Lake City that you can find in Vegas if you look hard enough, what I am looking for are the cities which glory in their seamy reputation, the places where drugs, gambling, prostitution, murder for hire, official corruption, and talking in the theater are the norm rather than the exception.
I came up with four:
Las Vegas
New Orleans
Rio de Janero
Singapore
I could add a few more, but am not certain enough of my facts to put them down in pixels. Amsterdam has the drugs and the prostitution, but does it have the overall seediness to qualify? Does Macao still have that reputation, or was that a century ago? Is Hong Kong included, or are its sins nowadays more of a financial nature than those of the flesh?
I’m sure we have more than enough expertise on the Dope to fill out or correct my list. What are your nominations for the Seven Sinful Cities?
I’m not sure than Singapore qualifies: you can get flogged for littering there, and that’s not such a big sin. But, if Singapore, then I’d suggest adding Bangkok and Hong Kong to the list.
I agree with everyone who’s mentioned Tijuana, I moved away from there almost a year ago but it’s been the wild west over there, especially these last five years.
St. Petersburg, Florida. On the surface it seems quiet… TOO QUIET. Yet beneath its brittle veneer of geriatric indifference lurks a seething cauldron of immorality and perversion. Some of these debaucheries are known only to the extremely elderly. Here, every form of depravity is catered to for the right price. Corruption and degeneracy are rampant in this unwholesome bastion of moral turpitude. Vile pedlars hawk their obscene wares along the shadowed market streets, chanting hoarsely in unknown tongues. In the pallid light of dawn, heavily cloaked figures move silently among the gutters, gathering up the dead; corpses eviscerated of organs, corneas, bone marrow, scavenged over until they are practically unidentifiable as human.
I’d say Riga would qualify. As I in one weekend there got threatened by the russian mob (at a restaurant) and a guy who kept offering me “whatever you can think of” when I walked past his car.