500 Words From Olivier Lafont

500 Words From...is a series of guest posts from authors, in which they talk about their recently published books. Here Olivier Lafont, a Frenchman whose parents moved him to India as a child, and who is well-known in his adopted home as an actor, screenwriter, and brand-ambassador, discusses his debut novel, Warrior, which was shortlisted for the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize. 

500 Words From KH Lim

500 Words From...is a series of guest posts from authors, in which they talk about their recently published books and characters. Here Bruneian KH Lim discusses his debut novel, Written in Black, which is set in his home country.

A darkly humorous coming-of-age novel, Written in Black offers a snapshot of a few days in the life of a troubled 10-year-old, Jonathan Lee, who absconds from his grandfather’s wake in an empty coffin. He then embarks on a journey across Brunei.  His travels bring him into contact with poklans – Bruneian teenage delinquents – weird shopkeepers, and the inhabitants of cursed houses.  Along the way, he discovers adventure, courage, friendship - and, eventually, himself.

So: over to KH Lim…

“Written in Black is about a boy from a broken family, who escapes his grandfather's funeral to find his runaway elder brother. Why? Because only his brother might know the truth about why their mother left the country six months ago. If all that sounds too optimistic for you, I forgot to add that he also gets regularly picked on by an unsympathetic and rather volatile father. Hopefully he'll make it through alright in the end, but definitely not unchanged…

500 Words From PP Wong

500 Words From...is a series of guest posts from authors, in which they talk about their books and characters.  Here, PP Wong, apparently the first British-born, ethnically-Chinese novelist to be published in the UK, discusses her debut novel, The Life of a Banana.

The Chinese slang word banana refers to ethnically Chinese people who are yellow on the outside, white on the inside – in other words, heavily westernised. PP Wong’s main character, Xing Li, is a banana on the brink of adolescence. Although born and raised in London, she never feels she fits in there, especially after her mother dies and she goes to live with her grandma, and her strange Uncle Ho. In order to find her own identity, Xing Li must first negotiate cultural and generational conflicts, whilst discovering what it means to be both British, and Chinese.

So: over to PP Wong…

500 Words From Ovidia Yu

500 Words From...is a series of guest posts from authors, in which they talk about their books and characters.  Here, Ovidia Yu, one of Singapore’s most acclaimed authors, talks about Aunty Lee, feisty widow, amateur sleuth, and proprietor of The Lion City’s best-loved home-cooking restaurant.  Aunty Lee has now brought her charm and wit - not to mention her intelligence, nosiness, and crime-solving skills - to two delectable mysteries, Aunty Lee’s Delights, and Aunty Lee’s Deadly Specials.  Both books are published internationally by William Morrow Paperbacks, enabling readers far beyond Singapore to be beguiled by Aunty Lee. 

So, over to Ovidia…

“Inspiration for Aunty Lee? Parts of Aunty Lee came from various so-called aunties I know - not necessarily older, good at cooking or even female! She loves cooking and feeding people and as far as she is concerned, eating together is the best way of becoming friends. She also loves sorting out other people’s problems for them, including murders they may be suspected of committing.

Happy Halloween! 500 Words From Andrew Lee

500 Words From...is a series of guest posts from authors, in which they talk about their newly-published books.  Here, for Halloween, Andrew Lee explains the background behind his Asian Spine Chillers series. The four volumes bring together macabre stories from Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Hong Kong, as well as letters to Andrew from terrified readers sharing their supernatural experiences. In addition, with the use of innovative augmented reality technology, readers can bring their print books to virtual life, by using their smartphones, or tablets, to watch a bonus hidden story, The Devil’s Blade, told in twelve episodes.

So, over to Andrew…

“Greetings from the Dark Side!

Asian Spine Chillers was in a great part prompted by my childhood reading. From a very early age I was attracted to the macabre. I forwent the childish tales most kids my age enjoyed. While my classmates were reading Enid Blyton, I read Poe and Edgar Wallace, along with many other authors of tales of horror and the supernatural. Throughout my childhood I sought out and found books, and later videos and films, of the sort that most parents would consign to the rubbish heap, or to a locked cupboard, if they ever found them. However, my parents were not like most. My mother had significant clairvoyant skills, and my father was an atheist who suffered severe depression, or what today would be called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The Second World War had scarred him deeply and the images, sounds and memories of that war never left him. He was a deeply unhappy man and, lost in his own darkness, he didn’t see or care what I chose to read or watch. Both parents are now long in their graves.  My father bequeathed to me a degree of blackness, and from my mother I have inherited The Sight – it is not as powerful in me as it was in her, but at times it provides me with great insight.

And so I grew up with a love of the unusual, and the supernatural. Then, in my teenage years I met and lived with a genuine Romany gypsy princess who had incredible psychic powers. She further fuelled my interest in the supernatural. I began writing down the tales that came to mind from this point.

I have lived at various times in Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Singapore and Bangkok. In each place I spent time talking to local people, particularly country folk and those from out of the way corners where life is a little less plastic and regimented than in the cities. They told me tales passed down from generation to generation, and I became like a sponge, absorbing their stories. Sitting with a coffee, tea or beer and talking to these people, the stories, real or imagined, grew and kept on growing.

Sometimes not a person, but a place suggested a story. One of my favourite places for inspiration is Pulau Ubin, a tiny island off Singapore where life is still mostly rural. When I visit Singapore from my current home in New Zealand, I go to Pulau Ubin and spend the day walking, thinking, and soaking up the atmosphere, letting my imagination run free. Also in Singapore, the abandoned Second World War fort on Sentosa, another island off the mainland, likewise holds magic for me. I will go there, find a quiet corner and spend hours, notebook in hand catching the thoughts that come. Hong Kong has its magic corners for me too, as does every city and country I have visited.

As an author, it is wonderful when you find a place where magic lies in wait, ready for you to unleash it and capture it on the page. It is even better that now, with augmented reality technology, you can unleash it in sound and pictures as well.  My publishers, Monsoon, have made available a free augmented reality app so readers can access The Devil’s Blade, I hope they will be captivated by what awaits…

The readers’ letters that are becoming such a feature of the Spine Chillers started purely as a writer’s device. However, since word about the series started to spread, Monsoon has been finding more and more letters arriving in their mail as people share their unearthly experiences. I am writing further volumes and I encourage anyone with a tale of the macabre and the supernatural to email it to me at: info@monsoonbooks.com.sg”

500 Words From Harriette Rinaldi

500 Words From...is a series of guest posts from authors, in which they talk about their newly-published books.  Here Harriette Rinaldi explains the background behind Four Faces of Truth, published by Fireship Press.

Harriette Rinaldi, an American, had a long career with the Central Intelligence Agency. During her time as a spook she undertook many challenging overseas assignments, and held several leadership positions – she founded the CIA’s Women’s Leadership Forum.

Four Faces of Truth is Harriette’s first novel. It is set in Cambodia, from the early 1960s until the present day – so including the time of the rise and dominance of the Khmer Rouge. It interweaves the stories of four narrators; like the four faces which stare out from the towers of the famous Bayon temple, at Angkor Thom, each narrator views the world from a different perspective.

Hem Narong, a former Buddhist monk, serves on the staff of General Lon Nol, the first President of the Khmer Republic. He sees how the General’s ineptitude and failings as a leader facilitate the rise of the Khmer Rouge.

Sophana, a young graduate of an elite secondary school, joins the Woman’s Communist Organization.  She is ultimately betrayed by the revolution she once supported, loses her entire family in the killing fields, and continues to be haunted by brooding shadows and visions of the horrors she has witnessed.

Eng Maly, a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, specializes in diseases of the mind. Maly treats Pol Pot’s wife, Khieu Ponnary, for paranoid schizophrenia and accompanies Ponnary on dangerous treks across the country on behalf of the revolution. Maly witnesses Ponnary's malign influence on her husband.

Marcel Blanchette, a French-Canadian archaeologist restoring ancient temples, must today contend with the damage inflicted on Cambodia’s architectural heritage and natural resources by the Khmer Rouge. He decries efforts by contemporary Cambodian rulers to foster national amnesia regarding the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, which he terms patriacide - the attempted annihilation of an entire country and its people, including its collective memory.

 

So:  500 Words From…. Harriette Rinaldi

Why did I decide to write this novel now, almost forty years after the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia? Because too many people throughout the world are either unaware of or have forgotten about the horrible crimes of the Khmer Rouge. There are important parallels and lessons that apply to what is happening elsewhere in the world today.

I lived in Cambodia during the 1970s, met key government as well as Khmer Rouge personalities (including the sister of Pol Pot’s wife), and was able to travel to many parts of the country despite the ongoing war between government and Khmer Rouge forces. I had a unique opportunity to observe the folly of U.S. policies and the failings of Cambodian government leaders, and the beauty of Cambodia’s amazing natural resources, in contrast to the looming specter of a nightmarish regime intent on destroying everything and everyone in its path.

I used the vehicle of historical fiction to tell this story and to present it through the voices of four fictional narrators whose lives often intersect, forming a unified mosaic. Books by historians about the Khmer Rouge are largely inaccessible to lay readers, while memoirs by Khmer Rouge survivors are often devoid of any wider historical context. My goal was to enable the lay reader to understand not only the suffering of the Khmer people, but also the overarching political and cultural influences that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. 

To write this book, I had access to unique source material, including the recently declassified correspondence between U.S. President Richard Nixon and Cambodian President Lon Nol. I also enjoyed full access to the treasure trove of information found in the Khmer Rouge secret archives in the 1990s by a Yale University team led by historian Ben Kiernan, who encouraged me to write this book.

Another topic briefly touched upon by historians and journalists is the extent to which Pol Pot was influenced by his wife, who is usually described as mentally unstable or emotionally fragile. In fact, she suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. I used material from a variety of sources, including doctors who treated her in Beijing, to demonstrate just how she enabled her husband’s descent into evil while she was gradually consumed by madness. 

500 Words From Brian Stoddart

500 Words From...is a series of guest posts from authors, in which they talk about their newly-published books.  Here Brian Stoddart explains the background behind A Madras Miasma, published by Crime Wave Press.  

Brian Stoddart is a writer, blogger, commentator, and academic.  He is a former Vice-Chancellor and President of La Trobe University in Australia where he is now an Emeritus Professor, in addition to being a Distinguished Fellow of the Australia India Institute at the University of Melbourne. Brian has lived and worked all around the world, most recently in Phnom Penh and Damascus - he wrote about the city in A House in Damascus: Before the Fall, an account of life immediately prior to the present conflict. He has published widely on aspects of India’s modern history. 

A Madras Miasma is Brian's first novel. It introduces Superintendent Chris Le Fanu of the Indian Police Service, who heads a new investigative crime unit in 1920s Madras. He clashes with the city’s Commissioner just when the rise of Gandhi’s nationalist movement is making the European community fear for its future. Le Fanu thinks political change is inevitable, so he is considered almost a traitor by his colleagues. Meanwhile, his wife has left him, and he is now controversially involved with his housekeeper, a mixed race Anglo-Indian. When a young Englishwoman is found murdered, Le Fanu uncovers a drug ring led by the city’s leading European businessman, thus further upsetting the city’s elite and putting his career at risk.

So:  500 Words From….Brian Stoddart

Madras, now called Chennai, was the first non-Western city I lived in way back in the last millennium, and remains a favourite anywhere among many. I read about it extensively in my PhD research so “knew” it as an entity when I arrived. Crime fiction does that, too: I “knew” where to go in Venice when I arrived there, having read all Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti novels! My cultural knowledge of Madras, though, grew over years as the city, like most in India, changed greatly but somehow retained its distinctiveness.

My research on British India’s Madras Presidency revealed as much socially as it did politically, and introduced me to many characters whose real lives sounded like fiction. I mention in particular Arthur Galletti, an extraordinary Anglo-Italian who served as an Indian Civil Service officer in Madras from 1900 to 1934. I decided he was so interesting I wrote his biography. Click here for details.

My dissertation concerned the rise of Indian nationalism in the south, but I became just as fascinated by people like Galletti and their families who shipped out from Britain to find themselves hundreds of miles from a major centre, overseeing millions of people as the Raj clung precariously to power. What made these people tick?

Although my academic interests later varied, India always remained a focus. So did my reading of crime fiction. Much is now written about the genre, but one driving interest for me was always the interaction between characters, events and places with locations shaping stories. The Kiwi crime writer Ngaio Marsh set the pace when from the 1930s to the 1950s she had her main character relocate from London to New Zealand in several stories, but the real trend for linking crime and place came later. It is typified in the so-called tartan noir of Ian Rankin and his successors and in writers like Barbara Nadel (Istanbul), Andrea Camilleri (Sicily), Jason Webster (Spain), Michael Walters (Mongolia), Mukoma Wa Ngugi (Kenya) and numerous others. This is the social geography of crime, represented in Southeast Asia by writers like Colin Cotterill, Sharmini Flint and Tom Vater, to name a few.

Given my background, when I wanted to write about British India in a different way, an historical crime novel was the obvious choice - and that led to Superintendent Le Fanu. A little research will reveal three things: there was a nineteenth century Madras Indian Civil Service officer called William Joseph Henry Le Fanu; he was a relative of another Le Fanu who became Primate of the Anglican Church in Australia; and he was also related to the Irish crime/horror writer Sheridan Le Fanu. The name selected itself. Similarly, much of the context for A Madras Miasma is formed by the actual events of the early 1920s and some real historical figures appear, hopefully adding authenticity to the story.

A Madras Miasma is the first title in a projected series. The second Le Fanu novel is under way - he will return with another case later this year or early next. Once again, the story is as much about Madras as about him, the city is his marker.

A Madras Miasma is currently available as an eBook.  A paperback is forthcoming, the date to be announced. 

500 Words From Ann Bennett

500 Words From...is a series of guest posts from authors, in which they talk about their newly-published books.  Here Ann Bennett explains the background behind Bamboo Heart, published in paperback today by Monsoon Books.

Ann Bennett is a UK-based novelist and lawyer. 

Set in South East Asia both in the present and before and during the Second World War, Bamboo Heart captures the suffering and courage of prisoners of war of the Japanese. It tells the story of Tom Ellis, a prisoner enslaved on the infamous Death Railway in Thailand, and charts the journey of his daughter, Laura, who turns her back on her comfortable lifestyle in eighties London to investigate her father's wartime experience.

So: 500 Words From Ann Bennett

At the end of the Second World War allied intelligence services surveyed newly-released prisoners of war with so-called liberation questionnaires. My novel, Bamboo Heart, started life when I discovered my father’s liberation questionnaire in Britain's National Archives. It was an amazing moment when I first saw it; written in his perfect copper-plate hand, it answered so many questions I would like to have asked. From that moment I knew I had to write about his experiences as a prisoner-of-war on the Death Railway in Thailand.

This discovery was the culmination of a lifetime’s quest to find out what had happened to my father during the war. He died when I was only seven, and growing up I became increasingly interested in his past. He hardly spoke about the war, having started a new life with my mother on his return to England in 1945. I was interested enough to travel to Kanchanaburi to see the railway in 1988. On that trip I fell in love with South East Asia, but found out very little about what had happened to my father there.

I took the tragic events Dad described in his questionnaire as the basis of Tom’s story in Bamboo Heart. I wanted to write about those events from the perspective of one man, within the framework of a fast-moving narrative. My aim was to bring those events alive without it feeling like a history lesson.

The events I was describing were harrowing. So to lighten the mood, I broke it up with flashbacks to Tom’s pre-war life in colonial Penang, where he fell in love. I also introduced a parallel modern plot, the story of Tom’s own daughter’s search for the truth about the war. For Laura’s story I drew upon my own life as a disaffected young lawyer in the eighties, and upon my memories of those times. The novel touches on the Wapping Riots, famous in the UK, which I remember well. Co-incidentally the first day of serious rioting was 15^th February 1986, the anniversary of the Fall of Singapore.

I tried to tell a story of hope and survival, to examine the reasons why some survived the worst of ordeals and others sadly did not. I also wanted to show what an important role history plays in all our lives; how powerfully our family’s past affects our own choices and values.

My research for Bamboo Heart taught me so much more about the war in the Far East than I had expected. I had not previously known how civilians suffered; about starvation and massacres, about bravery and sacrifice. It inspired me to explore those events from other angles and through other peoples’ stories. 

Bamboo Heart is the first novel in a planned trilogy. I have just finished writing Bamboo Island, about Juliet, a plantation owner’s wife, who has lived a reclusive life since the war robbed her of everyone she loved. The sudden appearance of a stranger disrupts her lonely existence and stirs up unsettling memories.

I’m also working on a third novel: Bamboo Road, about of the daughter of a member of the Thai resistance which tells how the influx of prisoners-of-war into that remote jungle region affects her life.

Click here for Ann’s website.

500 Words From Ezra Kyrill Erker

500 Words From...is a series of guest posts from authors, in which they talk about their newly-published books.  Here Ezra Kyrill Erker explains the background behind Salaryman Unbound, published by Crime Wave Press. 

Ezra Kyrill Erker was born in Germany and grew up in Europe, California and the South Pacific, before settling in East and Southeast Asia. The longest and most formative stint of his adult life so far was spent in central Japan. He now lives in Bangkok, working as a freelance journalist.

Salaryman Unbound  is set in a Japan of corporate intrigue, suburban loneliness and homicidal urges. Against this backdrop Shiro is having a midlife crisis. Unexceptional in his job, he works in the shadow of his charismatic boss. Unappreciated by his family, he has nothing to show for decades of doing the right thing - so he decides to try doing the wrong thing, and begins to plot the murders of strangers. His researches into methods of killing bring a dark structure to his life, and a black self-belief. Eventually, he targets Sayuri, a neglected housewife, and soon the would be killer falls victim to love. When a body is found, Shiro’s and Sayuri’s lives are thrown into upheaval, and the divisions between guilt and innocence are lost.

So: 500 Words From Ezra Kyrill Erker:

Salaryman Unbound began as a diversion while sitting in a café in Vientiane, a few months after leaving Japan. In an afternoon, an experimental paragraph had turned into a chapter. In three days, without plotting ahead, my longhand filled a small notebook. In three leisurely weeks I had a 20,000 word novella on my hands.

I wasn’t sure where it had come from, what dark recess of the subconscious could conjure such a disturbing tale. I’d just finished writing a collection of stories (which became A Bridge of Dreams: Asian Tales, published by Orchid Press) and a long, heavy coming-of-age novel (Embers, which should be out next year). Salaryman Unbound was a crime tale as far removed from those efforts as a book could get, and it had pretty much written itself. The question was: what to do with it?

Like many hastily written first drafts, it was a bit rubbish. Set in San Francisco, it had some flat dialogue and prose, and characters that didn’t leave much of an impression - but the main idea, of murder becoming an outlet for a mediocre man’s midlife crisis, seemed immediate and frightening. With the right set of circumstances it could be the story of my neighbour, a colleague or a friend. The difficult part was creating those circumstances.

The best fit was Japan, where a man’s company can become his purpose, his social life, his crutch, where it is harder to change careers or start over with a blank slate. Failure seems more permanent and more pervasive, and it makes sense that crime might become an outlet, a grasp at self-affirmation. I didn’t have to invent much - I knew provincial Japan very well from experience - and once I’d made the necessary cultural adjustments the story fit right in, like puzzle pieces fitting into place. I did some research into physiology and crime psychology, and the novel, now three times longer, with twists in the tail, was complete.

The novel is about how an everyman’s attempt at plotting the murder of a lonely housewife transforms his personality, so that suddenly everything seems possible. The new possibilities, however, include being more susceptible to suggestion, and the character becoming prone to a growing certainty that he is the ruler of his own destiny when in fact there are more variables at play than his awareness can take in.

We’ve all watched a heist film, or a television series about a rebel, a meth cooker, a gangster, a warrior, and caught ourselves cheering for the criminal, the outsider. There are elements of their situation we can relate to, and getting one over the system is something most of us at one point or another have secretly wished we could get away with.

In Shiro we have such an anti-hero. Told mostly through his eyes and mind, this is not a conventional crime novel but a literary and very personal drama, at the core of which just happens to be murder. I hope readers can find in its pages a story they both relate to and are frightened by. I was aiming to write a compelling and unpredictable page-turner. I hope Salaryman Unbound exposes some of the flaws and hopelessness of the human condition.

500 Words From Duncan Jepson

500 Words From...is a series of guest posts from authors, in which they talk about their newly-published books.  Here Duncan Jepson explains the background behind Emperors Once More, which is published today.  The novel is the first in a Hong Kong-based crime trilogy featuring Detective Alex Soong.

Duncan Jepson lives in Hong Kong. His first novel was  All The Flowers In Shanghai.  A founder and former managing editor of the Asia Literary Review, he writes regularly for the New York Times, Publishing Perspectives and the South China Morning Post.

Emperors Once More is set in the near future. It’s Hong Kong, 2017.  China has bailed out the West, but the West has defaulted on its debt.  On the eve of a crisis summit for world economic leaders, two Chinese Methodist ministers are killed in an apparently motiveless execution in Hong Kong’s financial district.

It appears that luck alone makes Detective Alex Soong one of the first officers at the scene.  But is his involvement more than incidental? Is the crime itself more than a senseless assassination? It seems so: Soong is contacted by a mysterious figure, and more massacres follow.

With the eyes of the world’s media fixed on Hong Kong, Soong must race to intercept his tormentor, and thwart a conspiracy born from one of the bloodiest confrontations of China’s past, which now threatens destruction in the present.

So: 500 words from Duncan Jepson…

It is known as the century of humiliation, a term that arose in China in the early 1900s to describe a number of events that started with the First Opium War in 1839 and was thought to have ended with the Communist Revolution in 1949. Those years included painful suffering at the hands of imperial powers and unequal treaties signed requiring China to pay what would now be billions of Renminbi. But it also involved some self-inflicted injuries such as the Taiping Rebellion and a general failure to modernise as needed to defend against foreign powers.

Yet, it had not ended, following a few productive years, China fell headlong into another twenty years of madness through the 100 Flowers Campaign, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. In the 1970s, Chinese people emerged from isolation to find that after 5000 years of civilisation, the last one hundred plus years had left them decades behind people in the West, who barely claim half the history. It seemed an unbelievable situation and the reaction was what some psychologists call the superiority inferiority complex – bitterness at a lost rightful place in the world but also doubt in the belief that perhaps it was deserved at all. For several generations there was a feeling of inferiority, a terribly heavy burden, to some it became a belief and way of life.

Emperors Once More is a story about an angry and bitter person from the generation which feels it has been betrayed by history and a young man from the new generation of modern global Chinese who are as comfortable in Europe or the US as they are in China. I wanted these generations to clash in an open forum but I also wanted to create a story that was entertaining and that pushed me as a writer. One particular story point was the demand by the older generation to return to better days regardless of the high cost and confused reasoning.

Longing for the familiar and fear and resistance to change can push people to try to stem whatever is next and spend vast resources on avoiding confronting the inevitable. Most wasteful is expense on war and revolution just to force a return to the past. Chinese history and culture is full of examples of attempts to maintain the past and a belief in the unquestioned respect for that which once was. To be declared a great classical artist was to have copied perfectly the masters before, to honour one’s parents was to follow their instruction, perhaps even forgo one’s own life for them, and at work one would be commanded without question. So much of the future given up, but not in humble deference to wisdom, often only in blind eagerness to nothing more than age.

The main character is hurt deeply by his own and his parents’ past and he transfers all his anger to reinstating the values and beliefs of something largely best left to fade into history. But he cannot, and instead must recreate it from jagged pieces of confused understanding and mistaken belief. Only a person who wants even more a new and unfamiliar future to succeed can defeat him and the two figures repeatedly clash as the story develops, each teasing the other that they are delusional and set to fail.

Another important element was to try to write a story with a faster pace than my first novel, and to meet the conventions of a crime novel. The level of difficulty was much more demanding and complex than I had imagined. A crime novel must meet the reader at pace and then maintain that momentum. I can only hope that I have succeeded in some way and that there is interest in a sequel as there are other relationships that I would like to explore in this narrative structure which might not be so successful shaped into another form.

Emperors Once More is published by Quercus. The hardback should be widely available in Asia, priced in local currencies, and the eBook  can be purchased from on-line bookstores, or else here direct from Quercus. 

Emperors Once More is eligible for the ABB Book of the Lunar Year in the Year of the Horse - see the post of Jan 30, 2014 for details. If you want to vote for it, please do so by posting a comment, or by e-mailing asianbooksblog@gmail.com.