Irreverent, informed and downright eclectic crime fiction and reportage from Southeast Asia and beyond
As the Burmese generals celebrate another well-deserved victory today – no, not the election results which are a foregone conclusion, but the staunch support the regime receives from China, India and Thailand, while European and American businesses are doing their best to get around sanctions so that, they say, Myanmar does not become a province [...]
The conflict between the Thai government and the Red Shirts – the former backed by a lose interest group that includes the military, royalists, part of the capital’s business community and right-wing fringe elements, commonly known as the Yellow Shirts, the latter a growing and motley collection of often paid supporters of fugitive former Prime [...]
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 [...]
I was saddened to hear that Sousath Phetrasy, the owner of the Mali Guest House in Phonsavan in Northern Laos, died, in his late 50s, on 25. September 2009. A brilliant and troubled man, Phetrasy was an unlikely veteran of the CIA’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s and 70s, the agency’s largest campaign, [...]
In The Great Railway Bazaar, published in 1975, best-selling travel writer Paul Theroux described Bangkok as “a hugely preposterous city of temples and brothels”. More than thirty years later, first time visitors to the City of Angels could be forgiven for thinking that Theroux‘s analysis is as valid today as it might have been then, in [...]