Eclectic crime fiction & informed, irreverent non-fiction from Asia & beyond
Very pleased to be publishing SAIGON DARK by Elka Ray this month. The first novel by a female author published by Crime Wave Press (we are keen but more than 90% of the submissions we get are by men) had me on the edge of my seat throughout. Good and bad. Life and death. Some […]
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 ReadingI was in Phnom Penh, Cambodia this week and had the opportunity to do some recording with The Mincers. Singer Zoe Zac and her merry punksters recently rolled in from Hobart, Tasmania to play a string of dates in Southeast Asia. Zoe organized two days studio time with producer Professor Kinski and we recorded two […]
Continue ReadingEveryone has a good book in them so they say, Asia’s first English-language crime publishing house looks set to put that adage to the test. Mark Bibby Jackson interviews me about all things Crime Wave Press in this month’s ASIA LIFE Magazine, both in the Thailand and Cambodia edition. I get to talk about crime […]
Continue ReadingJoel Brinkley’s book Cambodia’s Curse – The Modern History of a Troubled Land is the first book to examine the venality of Cambodia’s current government. Ever since Vietnamese withdrawal (Vietnam liberated the country from the genocidal yoke of the Khmer Rouge in 1979) in 1989, Prime Minister Hun Sen and an assortment of allied and […]
Continue ReadingThe Most Secret Place on Earth – The CIA’s Covert War in Laos, directed by Marc Eberle and written by Marc Eberle and Tom Vater has just been broadcast on the History Channel. The film traces the origin and development of the largest clandestine CIA operation to date (at least as far as the agency […]
Continue ReadingWilliam Young, the CIA agent who is credited with allegedly discovering Long Cheng in northern Laos, a remote valley which became a top secret CIA air base in 1965 – and soon after the busiest airport in the world – shot himself in Chiang Mai, Thailand a few days ago. During the making of the […]
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