Tag Archives: crime fiction in Thailand

Book review: The Dying Beach

the-dying-beachThere’s two things I love having on this site – special guests and crime fiction set in Asia.

Today’s post has both. 

Crime writer Robert Gott was kind enough to drop by and review my partner Angela Savage’s wonderful new book, The Dying Beach.

Gott is the author of the William Power trilogy of crime-caper novels set in 1940s Australia: Good MurderA Thing of Blood, and Amongst the Dead. More recently, he also authored the crime novel The Holiday Murders, out now through Scribe Publications.

Angela Savage’s The Dying Beach, the third novel in the series featuring Jayne Keeney, is a beautifully built book. Its parts slide together smoothly, with a satisfying, elegant ‘click’ of finely-tuned logic.

Apart from the working out of the whodunit component of the plot, The Dying Beach offers insights into Thai life and culture that go far beyond information gleaned from a Lonely Planet guidebook.

Savage knows this world well enough to negotiate the thousand subtle landmines a farang, or foreigner, might step on. It is fascinating watching what Savage calls, ‘the fraught dynamics of being a foreigner’, play out. Her private detective, Jayne Keeney, speaks fluent Thai which gives her, and by extension us, privileged access to the lives of the Thai people who inhabit the book.… Read more

Interview: Timothy Hallinan

The Queen of Patpong is the the fourth book by Timothy Hallinan set in Thailand featuring the character of Poke Rafferty, a Filipino Irish PI, but the first one I’ve read. As the book opens, Rafferty is living peacefully enough in Bangkok with his ex-bar girl wife Rose and Miaow, a young street kid they have more or less adopted. Until a very bad man called Howard Horner enters the story. He’s a security contractor in Afghanistan with a link to Rose’s past as a prostitute. Most of the book is an extended journey through Rose’s past, starting when she was a young girl called Kwan living in a poor village in the Thai countryside, through to her journey into the sex trade in Bangkok.

It’s one of the most interesting and unusual crime novels I’ve read recently. Tim was kind enough to answer some questions about his work for Pulp Curry.

I’ve just finished reading The Queen of Patpong. It’s your fourth Poke Rafferty book, but the first I’ve read. What made you want to set a crime novel in Thailand?

I’ve lived there off and on for 30 years, and it’s the most interesting city I know – just a total collision between sleaze and spirit, luxury and poverty, sprawl (it’s the third-biggest city in the world in terms of area) and small towns, because a lot of the little neighborhoods that make it up were once towns that the city ate, and they remain very insular. Read more