Tag Archives: John Fullerton

Guns, geezers, girls and terrorists

DTK Molise is a blogger and crime fiction enthusiast who splits his time between London, Zurich and Kabul. His excellent site, Kabul Noir, looks at the dark side of life in the Afghan capital, including the connections between crime and politics.

I recently asked him to locate and review crime fiction set in Afghanistan. Given its history and everything that continues to happen in that troubled country, you’d have thought there’d be numerous crime writers basing stories there. Think again.

What follows is his review of two of the few books he found, A Hostile Place by John Fullerton (Macmillan, 2003) and The Network by Jason Elliot (Bloomsbury, 2010). I want to thank DTK Molise for doing these reviews and I look forward to him filling the void in crime fiction in this part of the world.

Whether the story is focused on corruption, terrorism, military activities, or top-secret papers being published by WikiLeaks, Afghanistan is rarely out of the news.

The country is awash with stories and as result the western public is kept up-to-date on the daily happenings in what should by all accounts be an obscure Central Asian Republic marginally better known than Kyrgyzstan.  Communist coups, decades of war, the final nail in the Soviet Union’s coffin, the growth of the Taliban, and now the seemingly never-ending military occupation led by NATO have all helped to create the sense that Afghanistan is an important country.… Read more