Irreverent, informed and downright eclectic crime fiction and reportage from Southeast Asia and beyond
The third title by Crime Wave Press, Asia’s only crime fiction imprint (correct me if I’m wrong), is out now. Dead Sea by Sam Lopez is available from amazon. Down and out Luke and high-class Tara, linked intimately by a violent incident in London’s seedy King’s Cross, run away to the Philippines to escape their [...]
Major collaborator, friend and brother Marc Eberle spent months on this story, following Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition leader during her transition from the world’s most famous dissident to local politician. First broadcast on BBC2 last weekend. Co-directed by Angus MacQueen (who is also the producer) and Marc Eberle. A broadcast (different edit) [...]
From the vaults…a new track by Pussy & The Learjets, who played Bangkok punk rock for twelve months and then crashed and burned, as any great band should. This is a cover on The Thirteenth Floor Elevators You’re Gonna Miss Me, a huge song. And yes, I played guitar for The Learjets. With Manis on [...]
Long time collaborator Marc Eberle and his co-director Maung Maung Tha Myint have just released the trailer for their forth-coming documentary Burmese Fairy Tales, a small person’s journey into a mysterious world where spirituality and sex meet. Nono, a gay, cross-dressing dwarf visits the ancient Taungbyone spirit festival near Mandalay where psychics of the “third [...]
The excellent Noir Nation Vol. 2, an eFormat magazine featuring of course Noir fiction and non fiction essays on tattoos, is out now, including an essay pillaged from my recent book Sacred Skin. It’s yours for 10 bucks! Here’s the amazon link!
Aroon Thaewchatturat, photographer and co-author of Sacred Skin, my book on Thailand’s spirit tattoos – sak yant in Thai – is interviewed in this short film at Wat Bang Phra, during the annual Wai Kru (Respect your teacher) festival, during which thousands of tattoo devotees descend on this temple famous for its tattooing monks, an [...]
My story on Cambodian street food is out in the September/October edition of Silkwinds Magazine, inflight publication for Silk Air. Photographs by Aroon Thaewchatturat. To read the feature, click on this link and proceed to page 8.
I was in Sittwe, Rakhine State in Burma recently, the site of serious communal riots between Rakhine people and Muslim Rohingya who have been living in the state for generations and are currently the victims of a hate campaign instigated by politicians, ordinary people, Buddhist monks and government officials. I spent three weeks in Burma [...]
This is not a particularly hands-on story, nor did it involve any courage on my part. Better reportages on the same subject have surfaced in the media in recent days. And I am by no means a Burma expert, merely a writer who has worked in Southeast Asia for a decade and a half. But [...]
Dagmarah Mackos interviews me about my second novel, The Cambodian Book of the Dead, in last weekend’s Phnom Penh Post. Read the full interview here. Inside The Cambodian Book of the Dead: Cambodia 2001 – a country re-emerges from a half century of war, genocide, famine and cultural collapse. German Detective Maier travels to Phnom [...]