Eclectic crime fiction & informed, irreverent non-fiction from Asia & beyond
“Quintessentially this exhilarating read incorporates everything from lies and deception through to sex, betrayal and death, offering the reader an exercise in edge of your seat action combined with strong storytelling and believable characterisation.” The Man with the Golden Mind, the second […]
Continue ReadingCrime writer Paul Brazill interviews me about my current crime fiction projects including the republication of my 1960s CIA thriller The Man with the Golden Mind, featuring former war correspondent turned Detective Maier. The second Maier mystery is currently published by Crime Wave Press in ebook format. Julia Rendel asks Maier to investigate the twenty-five […]
Continue ReadingOriginally published by Exhibit A, my second Detective Maier novel, The Man with the Golden Mind, is now available again via Crime Wave Press. Julia Rendel asks Maier to investigate the twenty-five year old murder of her father, an East German cultural attaché who was killed near a fabled CIA airbase in central Laos in […]
Continue ReadingI somehow missed the recent passing of Vint Lawrence, CIA handler of notorious Hmong General Vang Pao in Long Cheng, Laos, in the early 60s, who threw his secret agent career away to become a political cartoonist in Washington. Read an obituary and summary of Vint’s remarkable life here. Vint Lawrence is interviewed in the […]
Continue ReadingGreat review of my second Detective Maier novel The Man with the Golden Mind at Looking for a Good Book, from 2014. Writers often hear the mantra “show, don’t tell,” but author Vater brings this to a new level. Rather than showing us what is happening, he brings us in to the environment and lets […]
Continue ReadingBetween 1995 and 2004 I recorded several hundred hours of music and sounds from Asia for The British Library’s National Sound Archive – material from Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, The Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, India and Nepal. I recorded mostly the music of minorities and musicians in remote rural locations. I released several CD collections of […]
Continue ReadingI was recently commissioned by a Thai English language magazine to write a short satirical piece abut Democracy in SE Asia. After much back and forth, the publication decided not to go ahead with the article, apparently due to the current political climate in Thailand. In the West – by which I generally mean the […]
Continue ReadingHmong Lao Khaen player in Vientiane 2001 The British Library holds a small but significant collection of Lao material, consisting of manuscripts, rare printed books, periodicals and post cards, mainly acquired after 1973. However, the oldest items in Lao language date back to the 19th century. The earliest book about Laos is in Italian and […]
Continue Reading“The Plain of Jars, what it’s a symbol of, is how those people on the vague frontiers, those people in the Third World, those people we never see, we never know about, we never hear, can be vaporised, wiped off the face of the earth without people back here even knowing about it.” My obituary […]
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