Category Archives: Asian noir

Noir Nation issue 2: Max Quinlan redux

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Issue 2 of Noir Nation, an international magazine of noir fiction is out.

It is packed with great noir fiction from all over the world. Included is a story by me called ‘Homeland’, which features Max Quinlan, an Vietnamese Australian ex-cop and missing persons investigator and the main character in my novel Ghost Money, currently out through Snubnose Press.

If you bought Ghost Money and enjoyed it, pick up a copy of Noir Nation and check out another gritty Quinlan tale. ‘Homeland’ is set in Melbourne in the nineties and involves Quinlan attempting to track down a young Vietnamese woman missing in Melbourne’s illegal sex trade.

You can pick up Noir Nation for your Kindle here and in e-pub format at Barnes & Noble here.

If you haven’t downloaded a copy of Ghost Money yet, wait are you waiting for?

Ghost Money is set in the mid-1990s and sees Quinlan travel to Cambodia, at that time still wracked by poverty and civil war, to try locate a missing Australian businessman. But he’s not the only one looking. As the country’s long-running Khmer Rouge insurgency fragments and the political temperature rises, Quinlan is slowly drawn into a two-decade long mystery that will take him to the heart of the Cambodia’s bloody past.… Read more

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How I came to write Ghost Money

Posted on September 3, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

I started writing the book that eventually became my debut novel Ghost Money in 1996 when I worked for several months in Cambodia as a wire service journalist.

I’d first travelled to Cambodia in 1992 while living in neighbouring Laos. It was a desperately poor and traumatised country. The Khmer Rouge, responsible for the deaths by starvation and torture of approximately 1.7 million Cambodians during their brief rule in the seventies, were still fighting from heavily fortified jungle bases. The government was an unstable coalition of two parties who’d been at each other’s throats for the better part of a decade and whose main interests were settling historical scores and making money.

Phnom Penh, the crumbling capital of the former French colony, was crawling with foreigners; peacekeepers sent by the West and its allies to enforce peace between the various factions, and their entourage of drop outs, hustlers, pimps, spies, do-gooders and journalists. The streets teemed with Cambodian men in military fatigues missing legs and arms, victims of the landmines strewn across the country. There was no power most of the time. The possible return of the Khmer Rouge caste a shadow over everything.

When the opportunity arose several years later to fill in with one of the wire services, I jumped at it.… Read more

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Posted in Asian noir, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Cambodia, Noir fiction, Snubnose Press

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