A WORLD OF TROUBLE

In the last six months Ive had the privledge of interviewing some twenty authors, many of them quite good. Their books have all been interesting and most had an overt focus on politics which is my primary interest. But, to be honest, none of the authors I have interviewed are household names, none have achieved the literary success of todays top authors as reflected in huge book sales and a prominent place for their books on the shelves in bookstores. Accordingly, the following interview breaks new ground. Oddly the author is not a household name, IN THE UNITED STATES, even though he is an American. He is however extremely well known in Asia and even in Europe where his books are prominently featured on shelves in book stores and elsewhere. His books are sold in e-book format in the U.S. and typically sell up to 50,000 each year yet American Publishers seem to avoid him as someone whose books dont have a great appeal to American audiences. Not that American book publishers have ever been wrong! The author is Jake Needham, an American expatriate who lives in Bangkok and who writes mostlly about Asia, in particular mystery stories set in Asia. The book I will discuss with Jake is A world of trouble which is one of his wildly popular Jack Sheppard novels and fortunately, for my purposes, does touch upon some political issues. True, these are not really political issues of great concern in the U.S., although at least one of the issues I raise in the interview should be. I will leave it too the reader to figure out which issue I am referring to but if you have read my essay, Things are going to get much worse, (http://www.scribd.com/doc/149794257) you can probably get it right. Anyway, I am really honored to interview my first big time author and hope you will find the interview interesting and add yourself to the growing number of Americans who buy and enjoy Jake Needham books. Note that Jake has agreed to both a written interview and a live blog radio interview for my Books and Politics Show. It will be on Monday night, September 3 rd at 7 p.m. California time (early morning in Bangkok) at www.blogtalkradio.com/angelsandwarriors. Dont miss this since Im sure it will be a fantastic interview and you will have a chance to ask questions of a really big time author. The written interview follows: 1. Jake, this interview has two quite separate objectives. First, Id like readers to know more about you and your book, A World of Trouble which I find quite interesting. Second, Id like to get your views on some real world political issues in SE Asia and the world. Is this dual purpose interview ok with you? Okay, lets do it. 2. Great, so could you tell my readers a little about your background, what qualifies you to write about Thailand and other SE Asia countries? Ive lived and worked in cities in the Asia Pacific region for over thirty years now. Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney, and Bangkok. A magazine called Asia Business once said, Needham certainly knows where some bodies are buried. I ought to. I helped bury enough of them. 3. What inspired you to write A World of Trouble?

3 I thought injecting Jack Shepherd into the social and political upheavals that have tormented Thailand over the last few years might produce a good novel, so I took a shot at it. I think it worked out pretty well. 4. Is A World of Trouble just a mystery novel, or is it also a political commentary? I dont do political commentary. I write novels. I tell stories. I make stuff up. But I still like for the stories I tell to have their roots in times and places that people recognize. CNN said my books read like they were ripped from the headlines. I thought that was a pretty nice complement, especially coming from CNN. 5. Would you tell us about the plot of your book and provide a little detail about your hero, Jack Shepherd, and about Charlie Kitnarock? Okay, heres the pitch for A WORLD OF TROUBLE Jack Shepherd was sick of Washington politics, sick of corporate law, and even a little sick of himself. So he hit the road looking for a new start, made a couple of wrong turns, and somehow wound up in Hong Kong. Now he needs a job, and being General Chalerm Kitnarock's lawyer is a job, so he takes it. Shepherd could certainly have done a lot worse for himself. Charlie Kitnarok is the world's ninety-eighth richest man. But he's also a former prime minister of Thailand now living in exile in Dubai. When he's not making money, he's plotting his return to political power. For Shepherd, that could be a real problem. Thailand already has a prime minister, and she's a woman with whom Shepherd once had a brief relationship. It will get particularly messy if, as Shepherd suspects, Charlie is smuggling arms to his supporters and intends to use the Thai army to seize control of the country. Can Shepherd keep his two friends from destroying each other and prevent Thailand from sliding into chaos? Thailand is hurtling closer and closer to a bloody civil war. And as unlikely as it may sound, Jack Shepherd is probably the only person on earth who can stop it. This is the third book I have written featuring Jack Shepherd. The first was LAUNDRY MAN and the second was KILLING PLATO. The fourth Jack Shepherd is being released this fall. Its called THE KING OF MACAU. 6. Are there any other characters in your book that need specific mention? And if so please tell us a bit about them. I think the third major character in A WORLD OF TROUBLE is pretty interesting. Shes a Thai woman named Kathleeya Srisophon who my readers first met in KILLING PLATO. Kate was the Director General of the Thai National Intelligence Agency then, and she and Shepherd developed a strong connection as a result of their joint involvement with a very important American fugitive named Plato Karsarkis. In A WORLD OF TROUBLE, through a series of

4 accidents and coincidences that absolutely no one anticipated, least of all her, Kate becomes prime minister of Thailand. As you may already know, the current prime minister of Thailand is a woman, but when I wrote A WORLD OF TROUBLE the whole idea of a woman prime minister was pretty much unthinkable to anyone who knew Thailand. A couple of people who read early drafts of the manuscript that became A WORLD OF TROUBLE even suggested I ought to take out the part about Kate becoming prime minister because it damaged the credibility of the rest of the novel. So there you go. Life imitated art once again. 7. Does the story accurately reflect political issues in Thailand today? Or is it pure fiction? Let me answer that by quoting a couple of paragraphs from a note I added to the front of A WORLD OF TROUBLE just before it was published I have a friend who was a senior intelligence officer in Asia for most of his career. On a night not long ago in Macau, we were smoking a couple of good cigars and talking about my books. He asked me how I had found out the truth about an event around which I had built the plot of one of them. I didnt find out about anything, I told him. I just made it up. Thats the thing about Asia, he chuckled. You really cant make anything up. No matter how outrageous what you have written might seem, one day somebody will come up to you and tell you it really happened, or that it is about to happen. Let me make this absolutely clear: I made up the events, the characters, and most of the politics in this novel. But more than once while writing it, I remembered what my friend had said that night in Macau. He usually turns out to be right when he makes an observation like that about Asia. Just this once, however, I really do hope he's wrong. 8. Charlie is a billionaire ex Prime Minister of Thailand, and as most readers know there is a billionaire ex Prime Minister of Thailand by the name of Thaksin Shinawatra. How would you compare the two? Clearly the whole idea of Charlie Kitnarock, a Thai billionaire and former prime minister now living in exile in Dubai, grew out of Thaksin Shinawatra, but -- as I keep saying -- this is a novel. Its basic elements may be rooted in things that are real, but that doesnt mean that the novel is real. For example, Charlie Kitnarock is a former general and rallies the military behind his scheme to return to power in Thailand. Thaksin Shinawatra is a former policeman, and it was the military that forced him out of power and exiled him to Dubai in the first place. 9. You are known within Asia as being one of the worlds top American fiction writers yet you are a relative unknown in the U.S. Can you explain this?

5 Easily. None of my books have ever been published or distributed in the United States in spite of being big sellers in Europe, Asia, and the UK. The Bangkok Post put it this way: Needham is probably the best known American writer nobody in America ever heard of. For fifteen years Ive been told by the gatekeepers to the book business in the United States that Americans dont want to read books by an American living in Asia who writes crime novels set in Asian cities. On the other hand, Ive also heard from a lot of readers in the US who wanted to get their hands on copies of my books but couldnt find them. So I arranged for all my titles to be made available in the U.S. in all the popular e-book formats and now Im selling about 50,000 copies a year there. Not bad for books that American publishers keep insisting to me that Americans dont want to read, huh? 10. What can you tell us about Thailands financial status? Does it thrive because of sweatshops making cheap products for export or is there something more enduring that underlies their economy? Thailand really is in a somewhat difficult position with regard to its long-term economic prospects. It no longer offers particularly low labor costs, certainly not when compared to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar, and it lacks the educated work force needed to produce greater productivity and justify higher wages. The standard of English in Thailand has consistently been rated by various business surveys as the worst in Southeast Asia and, in comparison say to China, the educational standards in Thailand in fields like computer science are incredibly low. You can make a good case that Thailand political instability and its lack of any comparative advantage as a commercial partner will lead to an economy more and more dependent on tourism and less involved in anything sophisticated that required education and innovation. 11. Hong Kong is part of China but is still quite different. For one thing the Hong Kong dollar is pegged against the U.S. dollar and not the Chinese Yuan. With the dollar being weakened by the foolish fiscal and monetary policy of the U.S. do you see this changing anytime soon? Is it likely that Hong Kong will adopt the Yuan as its currency? At the moment, of course, the US dollar is incredibly strong and the common view is that, in the medium-term at least, it will remain strong against most Asian currencies, particularly the Yuan. The Yuan has a very long road to becoming a freely convertible international currency, and the opaque, even fragile nature of the Chinese political system certainly leaves open the possibility that the Yuan will never become a truly convertible international currency. Right now, its very hard to see how a freely convertible currency controlled only by the market could be compatible with a closed and managed society like China. That said, I do think it is a near certainty that Hong Kong will eventually re-fix the Hong Kong dollar in Yuan terms rather than US dollar terms, but I have no idea when that will happen. It could be tomorrow. It could be a generation away. 12. Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and other SE Asia countries are all very active in International Trade. Can you provide any information as to the relative amount of trade these countries do with the U.S. versus their trade with Europe and with

6 China? I dont have any of those current numbers right at my fingertips, but let me at least say this from a general standpoint. An accurate ranking of the commercial influence those three regions have on Southeast Asia right now would go this way: (1) China, (2) China, (3) China, (4) Europe, (5) United States. Its impossible to overstate the degree to which China dominates the direction of economic growth in Southeast Asia. Americas influence is somewhere between very small and completely negligible. When the United States fled Vietnam in 1975, we turned our back on Asia for over a generation. Nobody in American wanted to hear about Asia after that, nobody wanted to be reminded of the frustration and shame of Vietnam. We wanted out of Southeast Asia, and we got our wish. Now we have to live with it. 13. I understand that there was a great deal of corruption involved when Bangkoks new airport was built a few years back. Can you offer any insight into what went on at that time? Its frequently pointed out, mostly by cynical old expats like me, that if it werent for corruption, Thais wouldnt be engaged in any productive commercial activity at all. The new airport was the gift that just kept on giving. It gushed bribes and kickbacks for thirty years. God only knows how many Mercedes Benzes and mistresses it paid for. Now Thailand is saddled with the worst major airport in Asia. And you know what? Nobody here really cares. Welcome to Thailand.

Jake, again my sincere thanks for agreeing to this interview and I am really looking forward to the live interview on September 3rd. Naturally I want to encourage readers to go to Amazon.com and order the e-book version of A World of Trouble and to be honest I am so inspired by what Ive learned from this interview that I plan to purchase a copy myself. If and when I get to Bangkok I will also purchase a printed version and look you up to get it signed. And of course I hope everyone that reads this interview will listen in to the live interview on September 3rd since it will be a real treat. David Welch