Both as a writer and a reader, I like crime novels that grow out of real events. LAUNDRY MAN, the first of my Jack Shepherd novels, grew out of several events that were very real indeed.

Those of you who have read LAUNDRY MAN will remember that at the beginning of the book Shepherd gets a telephone call from a guy who claims to be a former law partner of his named Barry Gale, a man Shepherd heard committed suicide years before. The call is so intriguing to Shepherd that he even agrees to meet the caller at midnight at a Bangkok short-order cafe called Took La Dee just to hear the story he has to tell.

Took Lae Dee is really nothing more than a little food-service counter stuck up at the front of an all night Foodland where a lot of foreigners buy their groceries. Its name translates from Thai as “cheap and good.” At least, it does if you pronounce it right. On the other hand, few foreigners struggling with Thai can manage the tones, so Took Lae Dee sometimes comes out with a falling rather than rising tone, turning the translation of its name into “sorrowful and good.” Since Took Lae Dee is a major hangout for the Bangkok nightshift, I always thought the two dueling translations framed the place pretty accurately.

This is the Foodland where Shepherd and Gale met. It’s been remodeled recently and no longer looks quite this crummy. Too bad, huh?

That night at the counter of Took La Dee, Gale spins Shepherd a convoluted tale about fronting for a group of Russian mobsters and buying a broken-down bank based in the Philippines.

“What bank did you buy?” I asked.

“The Asian Bank of Commerce.”

I stared at Barry. The ABC was a very minor Philippine bank that would have been utterly unknown had it not been making headlines over the past few months with sensational allegations of corruption on a grand scale. The cast of characters rumored to be involved was colorful if a touch familiar: corrupt government officials, fabulously wealthy sheiks, shady arms dealers, out-of-control intelligence agencies, and Asian criminal gangs. In fact, about the only international villains who hadn’t been getting press in connection with the ABC were Russian mobsters.

The general idea of the Asian Bank of Commerce was derived from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI, almost universally referred to by everyone as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals.

BCCI was founded in Pakistan in the early seventies with the hope that it would become the Third World’s first true multinational bank, but by the mid-eighties the BCCI had become nothing less than one of the largest and most far-reaching criminal conspiracies in history. The BCCI wasn’t merely an international bank with a lot of bad loans and some nasty customers like Manuel Noriega and an assortment of Columbian drug cartels, it spread to nearly every corner of the globe and become a central clearinghouse for all sorts of international crime, political bribery, illegal arms dealing, money laundering on a massive scale, and even the sale of nuclear weapons to terrorists.

Some of you may have seen a movie called ‘The International’ that was released a few years ago. It starred Clive Owen and Naomi Watts as a couple of interpol agents trying to expose the criminal conspiracy behind a huge multinational bank. The bank, of course, was really the BCCI even if they called it something else in the film, and while the film was wildly melodramatic and not very good, the overall story had far more credibility than a lot of people were prepared to admit. If you’re interested in the subject, I recommend a book called: ‘The Outlaw Bank – A Wild Ride into the Heart of BCCI’ written by Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, two Time Magazine reporters. It was published by Random House in 1993 and is the best and most dramatic narrative of the rise and fall of BCCI that I have ever read.

The BCCI wasn’t the only inspiration for my Asian Bank of Commerce, however. The Bangkok Bank of Commerce was very much in my mind as well. The BBC was a minor Thai bank that during the nineties came under the influence of Svengali-like Indian foreign exchange trader named Rakesh Saxena. With the Thai management just passively hanging on, Saxina converted the bank into a home for arms dealers, mercenaries, spooks, politicians, and crooks of every possible type. BBC spawned a labyrinth of fake companies and sported a cast of characters that even including the legendary Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khoshaggi. When the Bangkok Bank of Commerce collapsed in 1996, Saxena and the other executives fled Thailand leaving the Thai government holding the bag for billions of dollars in missing assets.

So when Barry Gale explains to Shepherd how he managed to buy the Asian Bank of Commerce and turn it into a front for international criminals, the tale has a ring of real authenticity to it.

“How could you buy control of the ABC for the Russian mob without anyone finding out?” I asked.

“It was no big deal. I set up a string of shell companies to hold the stock and some corporate cut outs that kept anyone from tracing its real ownership. I used a private investment fund registered in the British Virgin Islands, a venture capital group in Luxembourg, a Panamanian shipping line, two Hong Kong insurance brokers, and a whole bunch of companies that owned companies that were in partnerships that owned other companies. Hell, Jack, you know how it’s done. You’re better at putting together that sort of stuff than anyone I ever knew. Except maybe me.”

“And that gave you control of the Asian Bank of Commerce.”

“Only nobody knew it because we used about thirty different companies to buy and convert the bonds. It looked like a whole bunch of different companies each had a small piece.”

I doubted that. It certainly wouldn’t have looked that way if anyone was paying attention. On the other hand, Manila wasn’t much of a financial center and Barry had probably struck on one of the best places in the world to find exactly the right combination of credibility, stupidity, and greed he needed to make his deal fly. What passed for the banking authorities in the Philippines were mostly local politicians, none of whom would have particularly cared what Barry and his friends were actually doing with the ABC as long as they were taken care of.

The gist of the story that Barry had told me was beguilingly simple, but the implications were breathtaking. On the surface, he had just bought a broken-down bank that was operating in a reasonably respectable place and used a string of untraceable shell companies to control it. As a practical matter, however, Barry had done nothing less than hijack an entire country as a front for a gang of Russian mobsters.

If you haven’t read LAUNDRY MAN yet, I recommend it as the best way to begin the Jack Shepherd series. The second novel in the series, KILLING PLATO, is also available now and the third, A WORLD OF TROUBLE, will be published next month.

LAUNDRY MAN is available both in a trade paperback edition and in e-books editions for all sorts of different e-readers. Have a look at my website HERE for links to places where you can find LAUNDRY MAN in all of its various formats.

Stay cool.

At the beginning of LAUNDRY MAN, Jack Shepherd had only recently arrived in Bangkok, having taken a job — more on a whim than as a result of any studied contemplation — teaching in the business school at Chulalongkorn University. Where Shepherd lives and works in Bangkok are both real places, and here’s a look at both of them.

Chula, as it’s mostly known, is generally said to be Thailand’s most prestigious university. It is located right in the heart of Bangkok, but there are still parts of Chula’s campus that have a kind of serenity about them. At least they do if you focus your eyes in just one direction and don’t turn your head too far.

Shepherd is on the faculty of the Sasin Institute, which is the formal name for the graduate school of business at Chula.

The Sasin School of Business occupies two buildings on the far northern edge of the Chulalongkorn University campus, a hodgepodge of early Thai and late Stalinist architecture right in the heart of central Bangkok. The first building is pretty good looking. It has a sheltered garden at its entrance and students often gather there at tables scattered in the shade of big oak trees to grab a smoke or drink a coffee. The second building is ugly. Its utilitarian bulk sprouts straight out of a barren concrete pan that soaks up heat and roasts the feet of anyone foolish enough to try to cross it. My office is in the second building, on the sixth floor.

This is where Shepherd’s office is located…

Shepherd lives not far from the Chula campus in an apartment building called Chidlom Place, coincidentally the same building where my wife and I lived quite a while ago when we were first married.

Under anything like normal traffic conditions, Shepherd’s apartment would be no more than a ten minute drive from his office at Chula. Sadly, however, traffic conditions in Bangkok are seldom what anyone could describe as normal, so it generally takes him anywhere from fifteen minutes to nearly an hour to get from his apartment to his office.

This is Shepherd’s apartment building…..

Chidlom Place is quite a nice building by local standards, medium-sized with no more than two apartments on each of its twenty floors, and Anita and I had lived there ever since we’ve been together. There were hardly any Thais at all in the building for some reason. Foreigners with no visible means of support seemed to occupy most of the apartments. Anita had long ago christened it the eurotrash building.

That’s it for this week. Next week I’m thinking of making a few observations about the Asian banking scandals that gave me the initial idea for the plot of LAUNDRY MAN. Some of you may find that a little dull — I won’t have any pictures to go with the text — so fair warning.

If you’re enjoying my Letters from Asia, let me know. Even better, let somebody else know and help me expand my list of subscribers and possibly even attract some new readers. Send your friends around to my website. Maybe they’ll even find it interesting enough to read a book or two of mine.

Stay cool.

 

My series of novels featuring Jack Shepherd had its beginnings with the publication of THE BIG MANGO, although THE BIG MANGO has nothing at all to do with Jack Shepherd.

Let me explain…

THE BIG MANGO was first published about twelve years ago. I had never written a novel before and I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I tossed off the manuscript in a few months as a bit of a lark, mostly because I was sick of writing screenplays and just wanted to write something else for a change.

Frankly, I never thought much about what would become of THE BIG MANGO after it was written so, when it got published and attracted far more attention and more acclaim than it had ever occurred to me it could possibly get, I was a little bit flummoxed.

“There’s no room for improvement,” the Bangkok Post said. “It’s as good as it gets.“

Uh-oh. If THE BIG MANGO is “as good as it gets,” I thought, then what the hell am I going to do for an encore? So, for the first time, I sat down and gave some serious thought to this novel writing stuff.

I wanted to write another book, of course. The first one having been so well received, I would have been crazy not to. And, too, maybe the Bangkok Post thought THE BIG MANGO was “as good as it gets,” but I didn’t. I figured I could do better.

But then, what to write about in my second novel? I certainly didn’t want to fall into the swamp of bargirl and bullshit books that are typical of what most western writers seem to produce about Asia, and — sadly — what most readers seem to expect from western writers who live here. If I was going to invest a year of my life in writing another book, I wanted it to be about something worthy, a subject deep enough to sustain perhaps even a whole series of books.

And this is what I decided that subject ought to be…

An American who chucked in his old life on whim and is now an expatriate, living and surviving, both economically and personally, in an Asian culture he really understand as well as he thinks he does.

The life of an expatriate is something most Americans know next to nothing about. Most Americans don’t even know what the word expatriate means. A lot of people think of the word not as “expatriate” at all, but as “ex-patriot,” as in someone who was once a patriot but is no longer. And so I started inventing Jack Shepherd.

Shepherd is quite a prominent lawyer in Washington DC, at least he was until out of the blue an old friend offers him a job as a professor of international business at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. The whole idea of Jack Shepherd giving up his life as a prominent American lawyer, a man with political connections so good they extend into the heart of the While House itself, to teach business at a university in Thailand seemed laughable. But, completely on whim and without the slightest idea what he is getting into, Shepherd accepts.

My first novel featuring Jack Shepherd was LAUNDRY MAN.

When people in Washington first began to hear that I was leaving to live in Bangkok and teach at Chulalongkorn University, a few of them jumped to the conclusion I was making a point of some kind, abandoning the land of my birth for reasons that were probably political and no doubt wacky. Others who heard what I was doing—and I noticed this group seemed to be composed mainly of women—attributed my change of address to middle-aged male angst fueled by overly moist fantasies of slim, submissive Thai women serving me brightly colored tropical drinks with little umbrellas in them. 

Most people, of course, fell into neither of those categories. Most people just assumed that I had lost my damned mind.

Part of the problem was that the whole idea of living in a foreign country was just so strange to most Americans, particularly since very few of them had ever seriously entertained the thought, however fleetingly, themselves. After all, everyone wanted to come to America, didn’t they? Half the population of the earth was fighting to live in Orange County and work in a 7-Eleven, wasn’t it? Why in God’s name would an American even think of living anywhere else?

Then came KILLING PLATO.

“Everybody says you’re one of the smart guys, Jack. A first-rate legal mind.”

“I don’t practice law anymore. I just teach.”

“Yeah, I heard that. At Chulalongkorn University up in Bangkok.”

“That’s right.” 

“Pretty good place?”

“Pretty good.”

“But you don’t teach at the law school, do you?”

“No. At the Sasin Institute. I teach international business.”

“You like teaching?” 

“I like it a lot.”

What in the world was going on here? Karsarkis sounded like a man interviewing me for a job. I tried to read his eyes, but they had gone flat and in the fading light there at the end of the bar I could see nothing in them at all.

“You ever miss the action?” he asked.

“Action?”

“That stuff you used to do. All the hotshot stuff that made you famous.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I didn’t say anything at all. 

And, in March, Marshall Cavendish International is publishing the third of my Jack Shepherd novels, A WORLD OF TROUBLE.

In my next few Letters from Asia, I’m going to get you ready for A WORLD OF TROUBLE by introducing you to the Asian world in which Jack Shepherd lives. Some of it is real. Some of it I made up.

We’ll begin next week with a short tour of a place I most didn’t make up: Chulalongkorn University, probably Thailand’s most prestigious institution of higher education and the place for which Shepherd left Washington to become a professor of international business. I’ll show you a few pictures of the campus and the Sasin Institute where Shepherd teaches and has his office is. Then I’ll show you nearby Childom Place, the apartment building where Shepherd and his girlfriend Anita live.

If you haven’t read both of the published titles in Jack Shepherd series, would it be too crass of me to suggest this might be a good time to pick up whichever one you haven’t gotten around to reading yet?

I’ll be writing mostly about the background to both LAUNDRY MAN and KILLING PLATO for a while, probably — with a minor detour here and there — until A WORLD OF TROUBLE comes out in March. If you’ve read the novels, these letters will be a lot more interesting for you, so here are the pages at my website that have a bunch of links to places you can buy both the ebook editions and the trade paper editions of my Jack Shepherd novels:

LAUNDRY MAN

KILLING PLATO

The e-book editions of both titles are only $4.99 and they’re available in formats for every known e-reader out there. Heck, you can even buy them in PDF format and read them on your laptop. However you read my Jack Shepherd novels, I’m willing to bet they’re the most entertainment you’re ever going to get for five bucks. Give them a try, huh?

See you next week.

Stay cool.

Chinese New Year this year was on January 23, so I thought this week I would take a break from writing about the background of my novels and simply wish everyone a Happy New Year.

You may have heard that it is now the Year of the Dragon, but that’s not entirely correct. Technically — or at least so I am told by people far more knowledgable about such things than I am — we do not actually leave the Year of the White Rabbit and enter on the Year of the Water Dragon until February 4. Apparently Chinese astrologers have more calendars than Newt Gingrich has girlfriends.

Anyway, in honor of the occasion — whenever it actually occurs — a pal of mine and I spent a day wandering around Bangkok’s Chinatown wishing everyone 新年好！新年快乐！

Nobody seemed to have any idea what we were talking about, which was okay because neither did we. Regardless, Chinatown is always a good day out and we ran into some friendly folks who let us hang out with them for a while.

Here was one…..

And here was another…

I wondered a little why more people hadn’t been particularly friendly, but then I looked at the photos we took and realized I had been wearing my favorite baseball cap most of the time we were walking around Chinatown. Do you think that might have had something to do with it?

I had the cap made a few years ago for a friend who works for the…uh,government. He wasn’t even slightly amused at what I had thought was a pretty darned amusing gesture, and he gave it right back to me. I’ve been wearing it myself ever since.

I get a few looks occasionally, it’s true. Once, down in Phuket, I had a bunch of Iraqis come up and pose one-by-one with me for photographs. Apparently these Iraqis had more of a sense of humor than my friend who worked for the…uh, government.

But never mind all that. Whatever you think of my baseball cap, I send best wishes to all — even my friend with no sense of humor and my anonymous Iraqi pals — for health and prosperity in the Year of the Dragon.

Goodbye White Rabbit, hello Water Dragon….

Next week, we’ll get back to my usual theme here and I’ll begin introducing you to my Jack Shepherd crime thrillers, a series that began nearly ten years ago with the first publication of LAUNDRY MAN.

In my next Letter from Asia, I’m going to tell you a little bit about how the character of Jack Shepherd originated. Then, in my Letter after that, I’ll let you in on the true story that led me to write LAUNDRY MAN.

Keep cool.

Last week I took you to three very public places in Singapore that were featured in THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE. This week, our tour of Singapore gets a little more…well, personal.

Our first stop is an office building called Orchard Towers, which is a logical if unimaginative name for the building since it is located on Orchard Road just across the street from the Singapore Hilton.

During daylight hours, nobody I’ve ever met gives a damn about Orchard Towers. It’s just another dreary office building, the first four floors of which are commercial space arranged around an open atrium. After dark, it’s another story altogether. That’s when Orchard Towers becomes ground zero for the raunchiest nightlife in that part of Singapore, perhaps in all of Singapore.

Orchard Towers was not large, but its focus was single-minded. Every floor on its four lowest levels was lined with narrow bars bearing names like Naughty Girl, Bongo Bar, Club Romeo, and Queens Disco. Throngs of men drifted from one bar to another and, as the doors opened and closed, the clashing sounds of different music flooded the atrium with a painful din.

Tay’s sergeant, Robbie Kang, is following a suspect one night and is dismayed to see him disappear into Orchard Towers through the main entrance.

 Sergeant Kang had been inside Orchard Towers exactly twice before. The first time was on the night of his twenty-first birthday and the less said about that the better. The second time was four or five years ago when his best friend from school moved to Australia and gave himself a going-away party. Come to think of it, perhaps it would be better to forget about that occasion as well.

Orchard Towers was not a place where Singaporeans customarily went. It was a place for foreigners, and even then only male foreigners. All those foreign men went to Orchard Towers looking for Singaporean women, of course, but what they found instead was almost every other kind of woman on earth. Thai women, Filipino women, Cambodian women, Vietnamese women, Malay women, Indonesian women, Chinese women, Japanese women, and even a few Russian and Latin American women. 

They also found not a few women at Orchard Towers who looked a whole lot better than most of the others but weren’t actually women at all. Singapore had been famous for that sort of thing for generations. 

Sergeant Kang rode the escalators from the front entrance on Orchard Road all the way up through the atrium to the fourth floor to get his bearings. At the top, Kang stuck his head into a bar called the Crazy Horse. The place looked like a half-darkened school hall. Several women danced on a small stage at one end and there was a pool table at the other. 

The rest of the room was in darkness, but there was enough light for Kang to see the place was packed with people. At a glance it looked as if the women outnumbered the men, but most of the men were middle-aged Caucasians and Kang could see he would never find anybody in a crowd like this unless he ran straight into him. 

He glanced at his watch. One forty-five. Who the hell were all these people? Didn’t they sleep at night like everybody else?

When the suspect exits Orchard Towers through the back door, he is not alone, but then very few single men go into Orchard Towers with the intention of exiting alone regardless of which door they use.

Sergeant Kang has alerted Inspector Tay and, along with another sergeant Tay had called in for back up, they are waiting in a small cafe right next to the back entrance called Three Monkeys. This is where Tay and the two sergeants were.

The place looks a lot livelier at night, trust me on that one. But you really wouldn’t want to be standing around there after dark taking pictures of people coming out of the back entrance of Orchard Towers either. Trust me on that one, too.

While the suspect and his companion are in the taxi line, Kang gets his car out of the garage and Tay and Sergeant Lee slip into it. When the taxi drives away, Tay gestures for Kang to follow it.

Tay leaned back in his seat as Sergeant Kang pulled away. He still didn’t have the first idea how to play this, but he supposed not much would happen as long as they were following a taxi. There wasn’t anything he could do now but wait and see where they ended up.

They ended up at the Hoover Hotel on Balestier Road, not very far from Orchard Towers.

When the taxi stopped at the hotel’s entrance, Kang pulled to the curb and cut his lights. Tay and the two sergeants watched in silence as the suspect and his companion got out of the taxi and went into the hotel.

There was a small silence wheile the three men contemplated the front of the Hoover Hotel.

“A lot of the girls take their customers there, sir,” Sergeant Lee said.

Tay said nothing.

“What do you want to do now, sir?” Kang eventually asked.

Tay scratched at his ear as he studied the hotel’s entrance. “Anybody got a camera?” 

“There ought to be one in the glove box,” Kang said.

Tay opened the glove compartment and rummaged around he found a small Minolta digital camera. He turned it on and fiddled with the controls until he was sure the battery was charged.

Taking the camera with him, Tay got out of the car and crossed the street to the opposite sidewalk. The main road had no pedestrian traffic at that hour at all, but Tay saw several people on the street that ran along the side of the hotel. Was there another access to the hotel over there? He lifted the camera and squeezed off three exposures that included the side street in the frame. He had no  earthly idea what good they would do him, but he did it anyway.

THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE is one of my personal favorites out of all my novels. Unfortunately, it has gotten the least distribution of any of my books, but now that it is available in e-book editions compatible with virtually every e-reader, I really do hope Inspector Tay gets a good deal more exposure than he has had up until now.

The world of crime fiction is awash in Scottish cops, Italian cops, British cops, American cops, and even the occasional Dutch or Chinese or South African cop. Inspector Samuel Tay is pretty much the only Singaporean cop out there. If enough people eventually discover Sam and get to know him, I’d really like to bring him back for another tour of duty.

So please do recommend THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE to any of your friends who like international crime fiction. Sam Tay’s life depends on it.

I’ve always enjoyed novels that have a strong sense of place. Whenever I plan to visit a city about which I know every little, I look for a few contemporary novels in which it is featured and read them before I go.

Novels are simply far better than guidebooks as a way to get a real feel for a city. Going to Moscow? Forget Fordor’s. Just read a couple of Martin Cruz Smith novels and you’ll be all set.

Singapore isn’t a city that appears very often in popular fiction. I’m not sure why, not unless it’s the whole Singapore-is-boring thing I talked about last week, but it was that very oversight that was one of the principal reasons I invented Inspector Samuel Tay of Singapore CID. There were new streets to explore, new places to write about that no novelist had ever written about before.

Here are three key locations that play major roles in THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE….

The Singapore Marriott was a thirty-three story octagonal-shaped tower crowned by a gigantic Chinese-style roof that loomed over the corner of Scotts and Orchard Roads, the busiest intersection in the city. The roof was no doubt supposed to soften the building’s appearance by making it look vaguely reminiscent of a traditional Chinese pagoda. 

Tay thought that was ridiculous. What it really made the building look like was a giant dildo. Worse, the stupid roof was green with something right at its peak that resembled a red pom-pom. The Marriott not only looked like a giant dildo, it looked like a giant dildo wearing a green rubber with a red tip on it.

Merry fucking Christmas everybody.

The  American embassy had always looked to Tay like a combination of a Japanese warlord’s castle and the elephant house at a very prosperous zoo. The low-slung building was constructed entirely of giant blocks of stone that made the whole structure seem massively oversized. It sat well back from Napier Road atop a small, doubtless artificial rise and the grassy expanses surrounding it were a peculiar contrast to the uncompromising gray stone.

There was a security post out on the road built of glass and more gray stone. Beyond it, the only approach to the embassy was up a long, exposed concrete ramp. Tay figured its purpose was to give them a good opportunity to shoot you if the security post made a mistake in letting you in.

The dead bodies that turned up in Singapore were autopsied at the Centre for Forensic Medicine, and the Center for Forensic Medicine was located in a building called Block Nine of the Singapore General Hospital just on the other side of New Bridge Road behind the National Heart Centre. The building itself was a nondescript, modern two-story structure that looked like it could shelter almost any kind of commercial activity. But Tay knew all too well what actually took place inside Block Nine. 

Equipped as he was with that knowledge, the otherwise unremarkable structure with the aluminum chimney pipes poking out here and there took on a genuinely creepy appearance. Normally it would take Tay no more than five minutes to walk from his office in the Cantonment Complex to Block Nine. On this day, however, he wondered if he might be able stretch it out a little, perhaps even a lot. Like, maybe, to a year or so.

Sam Tay has a bit of a love-hate relationship with his city, but then most of us would have to admit to feeling something like that about the places we live.

 It broke his heart sometimes, this city of his. Back before the Marriott had been built, there was a traditional Chinese department store on that very same corner. It was a glorious building, each of its five floors wrapped in graceful, iron-arched galleries supported by tiled colonnades. Tay remembered the mysterious air they had cast over the structure, the way they had obscured its interior in dim shadows and enveloped it in an unnaturally soft, almost dreamlike light. Parallel lines of dark green shutters bordered every floor of the store and, as Singapore’s warm winds blew in and out of the half-open windows, the shutters clicked and clattered together with a sound that came back to him now with absolute clarity even after almost forty years.

Buildings like that were all gone now, as gone as if they had never existed at all, and his city was mostly somewhere he did not know, somewhere he had never been. For over thirty years, the people who decided such things — the bastards — had been tearing down glorious structures just because they were old. Sometimes they even replaced them with new structures touted as modern versions of whatever they replaced. They never were, of course. They never were anything, really, other than just new. 

Through the merciless grinders of progress the soul of a city had passed, along even with Tay’s own soul, and each of them had emerged as…well, he really had no idea. And the older Tay got, the harder it was for him to decide.

Next week, I’ll take you to three more settings I used in THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE, but prepare yourself.

A couple of these places will be just a touch, shall we say, on the raunchy side of town….

Stay cool.

Up until now, I’ve been writing to you mostly about the people and places that appear in my novels, but today I have something far more important to tell you about.

You may have heard about the warnings of a imminent terrorist attack on Americans in Bangkok. It’s pretty much all anybody is talking about here today.

Yesterday, around 1:00pm, the American Embassy scared the bejesus out of foreigners in Bangkok when they released a warning of a “specific and credible threat” of an immediate terrorist attack on Americans. That’s never happened here before, at least not that I know of, so when you hear language like that coming out of the embassy you pay close attention. Then, early in the evening, came reports that a Lebanese man with ties to Hezbollah had been arrested at Suvarnabhumi airport trying to leave the country.

After that, things got strange fast. But of course, since this is Bangkok, almost everything gets strange fast. More on that in a moment.

This morning the Thai police released a sketch of another man they said was involved in the planned attacks and who they seemed to have lost track of. Have you seen this man?

Yeah, me, too. I’ve seen him at every airport I’ve even been in and in the lobby of almost every hotel. Heck, looking out the window of my study this morning for ten minutes I saw him at least eight times.

Reports here are that the Israelis were the original source of the intelligence that Americans in Bangkok were suddenly sitting on a bullseye, and that the Israelis fingered Hezbollah as being behind the operation. American government sources have since been quoted by the New York Times as confirming the existence of a Hezbollah connection to the planned attacks and saying they believe that Bangkok is a major hub for the Hezbollah-controlled cocaine money-laundering network that United States law enforcement agencies have been trying to shut down.

Other than that, hard facts have been difficult to come by. The press here in Thailand is obsequious to a fault and utterly deferential to all Thai government officials. They simply repeat without blushing whatever horses hit they are fed.

But here’s what I’m hearing.

Some sources say two men entered Thailand to stage attacks on westerners. Others say it was three or more. Most sources do seem to agree that the method of attack was to be truck bombs left in one or more major tourist areas of the city where foreigners congregate. There are also reports that several days ago Thai police raided a room near Khao San Road where the alleged terrorists were staying  and that everyone in the room got away.

What we do know for sure right now is this much: other than the one man arrested at the airport last night, as of mid-day Saturday, any other Hezbollah killers who may be hunting westerners in Bangkok are still unaccounted for.

I only hope we don’t find them the hard way.

But that we might find them the hard way still has to be considered at least a possibility. Someone being identified as “an Israeli official speaking on the condition of anonymity” is being quoted by the Bangkok Post this morning as saying that, regardless of the arrest, the danger is far from over.

The Thais, as you might expect, are expressing a rather different view.

“I would like to tell the Thai people and foreigners that you can be free of worries from what the U.S. Embassy has warned because Thai authorities have known about this before New Year’s Day,” said Mr. Chalerm, the deputy prime minister. “Thailand is a polite country. Terrorism can happen anywhere else, but in Thailand? No, we will not allow you to do so.”

Right. Thailand is too nice for terrorists to attack. Just like Bali was.

Sometime next week we will return to our regularly scheduled programming and visit more of the places in Singapore that appear in THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE.

Unless, of course, these extraordinary events continue to unfold here in Bangkok. If they do, I’ll tell you what I know, and what I’m seeing.

My Letters from Asia go out to those of my readers who have registered to receive them before they appear on this website. If you would like to join that group and receive an advance copy in your inbox, you can do that HERE.

Stay cool.

 

Last week I introduced you to the Singapore I know, the one that made me want to write THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE. This week I’m going to tell you a little about Inspector Samuel Tay’s Singapore.

This is the neighborhood where Sam lives in a house that is a lot nicer than most Singaporean policeman can afford….

The area is called Emerald Hill. Most of the houses were build by Peranakans at the beginning of the 20th century as town residences for their mistresses, or so the story goes. The Peranakans were Chinese traders who had begun settling in Mallacca during the 18th century and married Malay women. The word Peranakan actually means ‘half-caste’ in Malay. The Peranakans in Singapore were mostly wealthy merchants and they considered themselves to be far higher in social class than more recent Chinese immigrants to Singapore since most of the new immigrants were manual laborers.

Some of the row houses in Emerald Hill have been converted today into bars, restaurants, and shops, but a few remain private residences. These houses are much coveted, not only for the graciousness of their design, but for their location. Emerald Hill is hidden from the bustle of Orchard Road, but still only a few steps away from it, and it is right in the central part of the city.

Here’s the way Tay’s house appears to the FBI man at the US Embassy when he shows up there unannounced one Sunday morning to talk to Sam:

Tay took one of the two brown leather chairs facing the row of French doors that opened onto his small, brick-paved garden. DeSouza glanced around and then settled himself on the couch opposite the two chairs.

“Jeez,” DeSouza said. “Nice house.”

Tay watched DeSouza run his eyes over the floor-to-ceiling bookcases that covered two walls of the room. Then he glanced at Tay’s small collection of contemporary oil paintings on the other walls, none of which he could apparently identify, and spent somewhat longer examining the Turkish rugs spread on the dark-stained oak floor.

“They must pay you guys better than they pay me,” he said.

“It was my father who was well paid.”

“And he gave you this house?”

“He died and left it to me.”

“Huh,” DeSouza grunted. “How about that? Christ, a rich cop.”

Inspector Tay’s office is in the Police Cantonment Complex….

The name is drawn from the building’s location, the corner of Cantonment Road and New Bridge Road, just a bit southwest of Chinatown. Inspector Tay is assigned to the Special Investigations Section of the Criminal Investigation Department, referred to as CID-SIS by Singaporeans, a people with a deep and abiding love of acronyms. After THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE was written, CID-SIS shifted most its operations across the city to the other major law enforcement complex in Singapore, Phoenix Park, but I think I’m going to let Sam stay at the Cantonment Complex regardless. It’s a lot cooler neighborhood.

Tay leaned back in his chair, swung his feet onto the desk, and shifted his gaze out the window. From his office on the fifteenth floor of the Cantonment Complex, he had a glorious view of the city. 

Straight ahead across the Singapore River lay the green patch of Fort Canning Park and off to the right were the glass and steel towers of the financial district. If Tay stood up and walked to the window and looked off to the left, he could even see the Marriott somewhere in the middle of the long line of luxury hotels scattered along Orchard Road. But then he wasn’t about to do that.

And then here is one of Sam’s favorite place to hang out when he isn’t in the office….

Instead of eating lunch on Fridays, he took a taxi to one of two places: Borders in Wheelock Place or Kinokuniya in Ngee Ann City. They were the two biggest bookstores he had ever seen and browsing through them without any specific purpose in mind was about as much fun as he had these days. 

This particular Friday, it was Borders’ privilege to bask in Tay’s patronage. He bought the British edition of Esquire which he thought far superior to the American version of the magazine, a breathtakingly expensive three-volume biography of Graham Greene, and a paperback copy of a Martin Cruz Smith novel set in Japan that he had intended to read when it first came out but had never gotten around to.

Tay was so pleased with his purchases that when he spotted an empty table in the outdoor area of Borders Café he plunked himself down without giving a thought to the time. He ordered a cappuccino that was served to him in a white ceramic cup the size of a cereal bowl. He wasn’t certain whether smoking was allowed there, but there had to be some benefit in being a policeman so he said to hell with it and smoked two Marlboros fired up with his brand new lighter anyway. 

Sadly, however, Borders is now no more.

A few years ago Borders Singapore was number one in sales among all the Borders stores worldwide, but Borders sold the Singapore store to an Australian retail group who set out to ‘diversify’ its merchandise. Surrounded by toys and cookware, book sales went into a steady decline. Ironically, the Australian group that owned Borders Singapore declared bankruptcy at about the same time the Borders chain in the US did, so the Singapore Boarders closed, too. The closing was unrelated to the bankruptcy of Borders in the US, but the result was the same either way: another pleasant place for readers to gather and enjoy the pleasure of browsing among aisle after aisle of books has been lost forever.

I am told the space that Borders once occupied is being taken over by Marks and Spencer, a mid-market UK department store chain specializing that sells mostly clothing. In the place where Sam Tay used to go on Friday to select his weekend reading, Tay will now be able to buy is underwear and socks instead. Somehow I don’t think he’s going to do that.

If you know some people who enjoys reading international crime thrillers and may never have heard of my books, I’d certainly appreciate you forwarding this email to them. Who knows? Instead of rereading THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO for the seventeenth time, they just might decide to swap cold, bleak Scandinavia for warm, sunny Singapore and give THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE a try.

Here’s where they can buy an e-book edition:

Kindle from Amazon US

Kindle from Amazon UK

Nook from Barnes & Noble

iBooks from Apple’s iTunes store

Or if they still prefer to do their reading on actual paper, here are some places online where they can order the trade paperback edition of THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE:

Amazon UK

NOQ Books Online Asia

The publisher’s web site

So go ahead and forward this email to your friends, or send them a link on Facebook or Twitter. They’ll thank you later.

And stay tuned. Next week we’ll visit some of the locations in Singapore that play major roles in THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE.

Singapore takes a lot of crap from old Asia hands. Too organized, they snicker. Too clean. Too contemporary.

On the whole, these displays of contempt seems to be rooted in some conviction that Singapore isn’t the ‘real’ Asia, whatever that means. Some of these folks call Singapore ‘Asia Light.’ Others call it all ‘Singabore.’

That’s not what I see when I look at Singapore. For me, the most interesting fiction grows out of a strong sense of place, and few places I know are as endlessly rich in the melding of east and west, past and future, as modern-day Singapore.

That’s why I wrote a crime thriller called THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE and set it in Singapore.  The central character is Inspector Samuel Tay of Singapore CID. The only child of a Singaporean mother and an American father, Inspector Tay is a little grumpy, a little lonely, a little overweight, and he smokes way too much. But he’s one hell of a cop.

THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE is one of the few crime thrillers I know of that takes place in Singapore. Actually, to be completely honest, it’s the ONLY crime thriller I know of that takes place in Singapore. Some people have told me they aren’t any other crime novels set in Singapore because Singapore is … well, dull. Who’d want to read a crime thriller set in a boring place like Singapore? Every time I hear somebody say that, I think of John Sandford’s very popular Lucas Davenport series — well over twenty books so far and still growing — that’s set in Minneapolis? MINNEAPOLIS? And some people claim Singapore is too dull a place for a crime thriller?

So let me begin these thoughts on Singapore with something everyone can agree on. Singapore is an amazing city visually. From it’s breathtakingly futuristic city center…

To its agreeable colonial-era shophouses…

And the waterfront mansions of Sentosa Cove…

But is the city of Singapore dramatic and exotic, or is it just a nice place to look at?

In 1993, Wired magazine in an inspired choice of writers sent William Gibson, author of NEUROMANCER, the man who made cyberpunk a household word, to do a piece on whether Singapore really was the city of the future as so many were saying.

The piece was published under the unforgettable title of ‘Disneyland with the Death Penalty.’ Here’s part of what Gibson said about Singapore:

Singapore is a relentlessly G-rated experience, micromanaged by a state that has the look and feel of a very large corporation. If IBM had ever bothered to actually possess a physical country, that country might have had a lot in common with Singapore. 

There’s a certain white-shirted constraint, an absolute humorlessness in the way Singapore Ltd. operates; conformity here is the prime directive, and the fuzzier brands of creativity are in extremely short supply.The physical past here has almost entirely vanished. There is no slack in Singapore. 

Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.

Then there’s a moment in THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE when Arthur Elliot Munson, the American Ambassador to Singapore, is being driven into the city from Changi Airport and, looking idly out the car window, expresses a similar view of Singapore.

The ambassador let his thoughts drift while he examined the almost unnaturally perfect landscaping that bordered the motorway into the city. Lush and well watered, glazed to the color of money, it never failed to catch his attention. Perfectly trimmed carpets of thick grass, banks of red and purple bougainvillea so rich and dense that they threatened to spill out over the road, and perfect lines of identically trimmed trees of exactly equal height as far as the eye could see.

Sometimes it seemed to him that Singapore wasn’t a city at all, but a replica of a city, something that had been built just yesterday to impress visitors rather than a habitat for actual human beings. Singapore bore about as much resemblance to the swarming, stinking, impoverished reality of Asia as San Diego did. Asia Light, some people called it. It always made him think of a gigantic movie set someone had built to represent a generic city. He had heard a lot of American television shows were actually filmed in Toronto because Toronto looked like everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Singapore was exactly like that. Everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Both of those views of Singapore are pretty typical of what people say when they only give the city a glance. It’s what’s on the surface of Singapore, what you see if you visit briefly and don’t really dig into the place. But if you’ve read THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE, then you’ve had a peek beneath the surface, and you know that there’s a lot going on that isn’t apparent to the casual visitor.

Here’s what Inspector Tay says about the claims of some that Singapore is boring…

On Sunday morning Tay rose late, made toast and coffee, and then thought about what to do with the final day of his weekend. He knew a lot of people claimed Singapore was boring. ‘Singabore,’ tourists sometimes called it. Usually that annoyed him, but sometimes he thought those people might well have a point. Still, he realized there was another possible explanation for his lethargy, and he liked that one even less. Maybe it was he who was boring, not the city. Perhaps he was just turning into an old fart, cranky and tedious, and that was that.

That’s pretty much my own view of Singapore. If you think it’s dull, you’d better take a close look in the mirror, pal.

I hope you’re already read THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE. If you haven’t, and it occurs to you as it did to me that Singapore is a heck of a lot more interesting and exotic than Minneapolis as a place to set a crime thriller, you’re in luck. I’ve got a real deal here for you…

Until January 9, the Kindle and Nook editions of THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE are on sale for only $.99 to lure those folks who got shiny new e-readers for Christmas and New Years into trying my crime novels. If you haven’t read THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE and would like to, here’s where you can go to buy the e-book editions for just $.99 until January 9 only:

Kindle from Amazon US

Kindle from Amazon UK

Nook from Barnes & Noble

So far, THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE is the only book I’ve written about  Inspector Tay, but Sam is one of my favorite characters and I’d really like to see him get another book or two. When THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE was available only in a print edition, its distribution was somewhat limited. The book was primarily sold in Asian markets with just a thousand or so copies making it to the UK and Europe, and none at all to the US or Canada. Happily it has sold well everywhere it’s been on bookstore shelves, but it hasn’t been on nearly enough of those shelves worldwide to make Sam even moderately famous. Now that THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE is finally available almost everywhere in its e-book editions, I hope Sam will get enough attention from readers for them to ask for more books featuring him.

Next week I’m going to show you some pictures of the real places in Singapore around which I built Sam Tay’s life: the neighborhood where he lives, the Police Cantonment Complex where he works, and the place he most likes to go when he’s not being a cop.

Then the following week we’ll visit some of the places the THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE takes place: the Singapore Marriott where a body is found in an empty suite, the American Embassy where Inspector Tay tangles with the US Ambassador, and even the Block Nine Center for Forensic Medicine which Sam tries his best to avoid since that’s where they do the autopsies.

Stay cool. See you next week.

Since it’s the holiday season, I’m sure you’re busy with all the usual kind of holiday stuff so I’m going to keep this letter pretty short.

You may know already that people in Thailand traditionally give each other New Years’ presents rather than Christmas presents. So in the spirt of the season I’ve got a small present for you, too.

THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE is a favorite book of mine and, possibly more important, my wife’s personal favorite out of all my novels. Inspector Samuel Tay of Singapore CID catches a case that takes him from Singapore to Pattaya and eventually to Bangkok in search of a killer who appears to be targeting American women connected with the US State Department.

As a New Year’s present from me to you, both the Kindle and Nook editions of THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE have been reduced to just $.99 for the next two weeks ONLY. I’d give the book to you for New Year’s, but my publisher says that would cause all sorts of problems with their online listings so instead we’ve reduced the price to just this token amount.

What else can you get for $.99 that’s more fun than a virtual visit to Singapore and Thailand? And where else can you buy a novel for $.99 that gets better reviews than this:

“THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE is another terrific book from a terrific writer. In the genre of crime fiction set in Asia, Jake Needham is in a class of his own.” –The Bangkok Post

Now let me say the most important part of all this again.

$.99 for the Kindle and Nook editions of  THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE.

Through January 8 ONLY. On January 9, both editions will go back to their regular price of $4.99.

You can go HERE to buy the Kindle edition on Amazon US for $.99, or HERE to buy the Kindle edition on Amazon UK for the sterling equivalent. You can go HERE to buy the Nook edition for $.99.

I know, I promised not to turn my Letters from Asia into a naked commercial for my books, but give me a break just this once, huh? I’m doing it now because my old friend Steve Leather says there’s an enormous amount of interest in trying new e-books at this time of year. Apparently a whole bunch of people get new Kindles or Nooks or iPads and they want to buy books to read on them as soon as their new toys are charged up.

So I’m looking at this as something like a public service announcement, not just a plug for my books. I’m helping folks find worthwhile content for all those brand new e-readers they got for Christmas and New Years. Okay, that’s pretty thin. I accept that.

Regardless, do you know anybody who got an e-reader or maybe an iPad for Christmas and who enjoys reading crime thrillers? If you do, please support my New Year’s public service gesture by sending them a link to this page. They’ll thank you later, I promise.

And maybe you could also give some serious thought to recommending THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE to your friends, your colleagues, and your family (yeah, even that crazy old uncle who’s in the bag most of the time). At $.99 it’s a real no-brainer bargain for them, and naturally I can use all the new readers I can get.

Okay, that’s it. End of commercial. We’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming next week. I’m going to be writing about Inspector Samuel Tay’s Singapore as it’s depicted in THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE.

So if you haven’t read THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE yourself yet, be sure to…uh, never mind.

Happy New Year,