Category Archives: Crime fiction and film from Thailand

Ten crime films about drug trafficking to see after The French Connection

Posted on October 17, 2021 by Andrew Nette| 10 Comments

In the process of researching and writing my latest piece for the CrimeReads site, on the real-life drug trafficking network that inspired William Friedkin’s ground-breaking 1971 crime film, The French Connection, I compiled a list of other movies directly or indirectly related to the film’s themes, the actual events that informed it, or that were influenced in some way by Friedkin’s classic. I didn’t have the space to include these details in my CrimeReads piece, but the list is below.

Panic in Needle Park (1971)

Around the same time that Popeye Doyle and Buddy Russo were pursuing Frog One through the winter streets of New York, The Panic in Needle Park was giving cinema goers a very different picture of the city’s heroin trade. Based on a 1966 novel and adapted for the screen by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunn, Jerry Schatzberg’s film is an incredibly downbeat look at the trouble romance between two denizens of New York’s heroin scene, young addict, Helen, the very underrated Kitty Winn, and small-time dealer Bobby, played by Al Pacino. It has been a while since I’ve seen The Panic In Needle Park but from memory it depicts the full spectrum of drug scene related experiences, including police harassment, prostitution, and the chemical highs and lows of addiction.… Read more

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Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, 1990s American crime films, Anthony Zerbe, Crime fiction and film from Thailand, Crime film, Gene Hackman, John Frankenheimer, Mafia, Poliziotteschi, Robert Stone, Sidney Lumet, Stuart Rosenberg, William Friedkin

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The real French Connection

Posted on October 9, 2021 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

My latest piece for the US site CrimeReads is a look at the real-life crimes that inspired William Friedkin’s 1971 classic, The French Connection. It is a tangled tale of Corsican gangsters, international heroin smuggling, the CIA and the war in Indochina – with a dash of my own experience in Laos. You can read the piece in full here.… Read more

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Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, Asian noir, Crime fiction and film from Cambodia, Crime fiction and film from Thailand, Crime Fiction and film set in Vietnam, Crime film, Gene Hackman, Mafia, Roy Scheider, True crime, William Friedkin

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Book review: Missing in Rangoon

Posted on October 15, 2013 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Missing in RangoonFor well over twenty years Canadian lawyer turned crime writer Christopher G Moore has chronicled change in Thailand and the surrounding region through the character of Bangkok-based American private investigator, Vincent Calvino.

Moore has penned thirteen Calvino books. Most of them are set in Thailand, although Moore has also taken his character to Vietnam and Cambodia. In the latest instalment, Missing in Rangoon, Calvino heads to Burma or, as it is now officially known, Myanmar.

The opening pages find Calvino standing in the shell of the Lonesome Hawk Bar, one of the establishments that used to form part of Washington Square, a well known and down at heel part of expat Bangkok, recently demolished to make way for yet another of the condominiums that mark the city’s skyline. Calvino suggests to the former owner that he should consider starting over in Rangoon, a city on the make and welcoming all comers, much like Bangkok was decades ago.

Not that Calvino particularly wants to make the journey himself. He’s being pressured to travel to Burma by a disagreeable English brothel owner, who wants to hire him to find his son. The son has disappeared in country’s capital along with his Burmese girlfriend, a real head turner and the lead singer in the band the son plays in.… Read more

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Posted in Asian noir, Book Reviews, Christopher G Moore, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Thailand, Noir fiction

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Book review: The Dying Beach

Posted on August 21, 2013 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

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 Murder, A 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

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Posted in Angela Savage, Australian crime fiction, Book Reviews, Crime fiction and film from Thailand

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Marking time in the City of Angels

Posted on June 25, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

Check InnI always find revisiting a city I’ve lived in after a long time away a bittersweet experience.

In the mid-nineties I spent nearly six years in South East Asia, with my partner Angela Savage, mainly working as a journalist. This included a year living in Bangkok, the abbreviated Thai name for which, Krung Thep, literally means “City of Angels”.

I also made countless trips to the city to transit to other places, for visa runs and R & R breaks. There was the time I got thrown out of Vietnam for something I’d written and had to cool my heels there for several weeks.  When my partner and I used to live in the Lao capital Vientiane we used to fly down specifically to buy English language fiction books.

Not that I ever needed much of a reason for a visit.

I loathed the Bangkok when I first visited it 1992, the pollution, the traffic and sheer, daunting bloody scale of the place. But when I left the region at the beginning of 1997, it was my favourite place. I loved the food, the people and the energy. I still like all these things, particularly the energy. New York? Bangkok’s the place that never sleeps unless it’s to grab a quick snooze on the back of a truck in slow moving traffic.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction and film from Thailand

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