Byline: Tom Vater

In her contemplative new travelogue Almost Home: The Asian Search Of A Geographic Trollop, American writer Janet Brown weaves two Asian tales into one. First and foremost, Brown’s cross-continental travelogue is a wonderfully understated account of the author’s spiritual, intellectual and literary drift-dive through Bangkok, Hong Kong, Beijing and Penang (in Malaysia). It’s a journey that goes under the skin. Readers are spared the usual tourist sites and are instead taken on a guided tour to the back streets, corner shops and roadside eateries of the four Asian cities Brown has called home. Throughout, the wise eye of a well travelled transnational illuminates small poignant moments, absorbs eccentric characters and documents cultural, social and political quirks.

On another level, Almost Home is a book that addresses the tricky question of where one belongs in a highly mobile, globalised world. Brown suffers from geographic agnosticism. She clearly loves life on the back roads of Asia and would be all but lost in the Far East, if it were not for her children back home in Seattle. She is torn between being close to her sons and following her urge to sail away into the unknown. Of course, her two longings can never be satisfied simultaneously and it is the resulting tension between missing the joys of home and not quite giving in to insatiable wanderlust which informs the author’s observations and adventures and adds a very personal dimension to the text.

Almost Home is a quiet, charming book, thought up and written far away from our million-miles-an-hour sensory overload culture. It’s a book that deserves to be read in print format; it’s a strange, wondrous object from the East, to be cherished and kept. Open Almost Home on almost every page and the everyday sounds, sights and smells of the Far East virtually jump, float and thud off the page and invite the reader to submerge her/himself in the visions and thoughts of what used to be called an ‘old Asia hand’ when books were still printed exclusively on paper.

Almost Home: The Asian Search Of A Geographic Trollop, by Janet Brown, is available for Kindle from Amazon.com at $10.42.

Bangkok pulp writer James Newman has hammered out another shot-from-the-hip fast-as-they-come thriller, featuring recovering alcoholic and PI Joe Dylan drifting through the Zone, a sly reference to William Burrough’s Interzone – a place where all races lead to the bottom, all smiles are false and everyone is out to kill everyone else for a few bucks. Like Burroughs, Newman both despises and admires the darkness he has witnessed and he manages to harvest a modicum of tragedy in his newest story.

Joe Dylan gets involved with a bar girl who turns up dead soon after. As he begins to investigate her suspicious suicide, he soon slips into a criminal web of fetish sex, human sacrifice and black magic and turns from the hunter to the hunted, with blow dart-shooting killers of uncertain gender on his trail. Even dwarves and the Ramayana provide cameos.

In fact, all the standard ghouls of the Bangkok night make an appearance, from psychotic ladyboys to flesh-eating monitor lizards. The writing is more fluid and assured than in Newman’s other novel, Bangkok Express, and Dylan’s journey through a world so rancid that the grime almost oozes through the screen – if one were to read the e-book edition of Red Night Zone – never falters. The circumstances of this particularly tragic reality are well explored, occasionally too deeply.

The heart of Newman’s literary mission – the crossing of Beat-style writing and observations of Thailand’s turgid world of sexpats – is not as obvious a concept as it may sound. The seedy Thai underworld is easy to describe and difficult to bring to life. Exuberant gaudiness and total degradation, detachment and vast suffering are opposites intrinsic to the Bangkok reality yet difficult to convey without either descending into tabloid journalism styles or out-and-out sleaze. Newman, by looking back to the Beats and the mass paperback culture of the ’40s and ’50s, is just far enough away from depravity to sail his ship. For the most part his observations on the monstrous are spot on, though his notion that the foreign Johns are the greater victims in the sordid death-sex-life dance that moves along the streets of downtown Bangkok will not be palatable to all readers. One presumes that Newman doesn’t care. The course is charted, there’s wind in the sails and Joe Dylan is likely to revisit the Zone somewhere near you soon. He will just slip into a barstool and turn his head and the chapter will start something like this: ‘The Nazi bargirl lit a cigarette and asked for a drink.’

Of course she did.

Red Night Zone, by James Newman, is available for Kindle now on Amazon.co.uk priced $4.95.

Max Quinlan is a PI on the trail of a shady Australian businessman who’s gone to ground in Southeast Asia. Quinlan, a half-Vietnamese, half-Australian ex-cop, has only recently taken up the detective mantle but he quickly becomes embroiled in post-war shenanigans in a 1996 Phnom Penh that is populated by shady characters, both foreign and local. He teams up with a Cambodian journalist and trawls back in time, through the Untac years, the long civil war, the genocide and the Killing Fields, the Vietnamese liberation and the ensuing civil war.

Quinlan is a contradictory guy, an ex-copper who blushes when spoken to by an Asian woman but can’t get his clothes off quick enough with a girl from Central America. He is in almost-denial of his Asian heritage and he absorbs Cambodia’s tragic history from a number of sources like a sponge without ever falling into the cynicism one might expect from his kind.

There is plenty of action in Ghost Money (the title refers to the sheets of paper or paper crafts burnt as ancestral offerings in Chinese tradition), especially in the second half of the book, as Quinlan edges closer to Cambodia’s heart of darkness, the nexus between a beleaguered Khmer Rouge and shameless foreign businessmen – the last game in town, in this instance Pailin, a last Khmer Rouge hold-out near the Thai border, at the time an independent economic zone that financed itself by selling gem stones and offering every vice known to man, precisely the kind of thing the Cambodian revolution had tried to eradicate only a couple of decades earlier.

Writing a crime novel set in this sad and violent Cambodia without delving into the country’s extreme history seems impossible. Nette knows his shit when it comes to the bloody convolutions of the Southeast Asian kingdom and spins a gripping yarn of greed and madness in the late 20th century. While feeding the reader with the horrors of our time, he also finds the space to skillfully reward us with the conventions of the genre – memorable femmes fatale, effective bad guys (not just one), fast action and lively dialogue. Quinlan, our man in Cambodia, beaten and pushed, cornered and outgunned, takes it all in his stride, ready for a sequel to Ghost Money, apparently.

Ghost Money, by Andrew Nette, is available now from Amazon.com as an eBook for $1.15.