Irreverent, informed and downright eclectic crime fiction and reportage from Southeast Asia and beyond
This is a travel story from some years back about a visit to a rather peculiar temple. So take a ride to the Temple of the Possessed…. Ashok was a great driver. We are on our way to Balaji Mandir, a temple dedicated to the mighty monkey king Hanuman, who rescued Sita, Ram’s wife, from [...]
7am, Sai Daeng Beach, Ko Tao, Thailand. The tourists are still slumbering peacefully in their bungalows and the reef in front of the beach lies placid. It’s not much of a reef, most of the coral has died – blame unregulated tourism and global warming. But here I am, quietly swimming out into the warm, [...]
I was just trawling through my archives and found this story – City of Fakes - from 2006, about Cambodia`s refusal to enforce international copyright laws. Of course, Cambodia is known to be a country where everything is for sale, if only one puts the right amount of dollars on the table. One glorious consequence [...]
Marc Eberle’s The Most Secret Place on Earth (The CIA Covert War in Laos), co-written by Tom Vater, has been nominated for the prestigious 2010 Banff World Television Awards.
While I was in Cambodia last week, I noticed that my 2006 non-fiction title Beyond the Pancake Trench is still available as a photocopied bootleg in several outlets around the country. My very own work, pirated by nefarious greedy people, does not sell nearly as well as the multitude of Lonely Planet titles that are [...]
Yesterday, the tense, month long stand-off between the Thai government and the Red shirts, supporters of international fugitive and former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, fought pitched battles around Khao San Road, the backpacker mile in Bangkok, Thailand. Several friends of mine were on site in the Banglamphu area, where more than two million budget tourists [...]
This story was originally published in my anthology Beyond the Pancake Trench, available at my Amazon Store, as Paradise Lost – How the Wild East is turning into a Trailer Park. There is a valley in the Himalayas so beautiful, that Shiva, Deity of 1008 names, Destroyer of the Universe, without Whom creation could not [...]
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One of Germany’s best known writers and TV intellectuals (yes, there‘s such a thing), Roger Willemsen, recently spent three months in Bangkok, writing about the city. Every night, the experienced media professional left his hotel at 6pm to explore the underbelly of Thailand’s capital. The result is Bangkok Noir, a 350 page coffee table book [...]