Q. You have created some splendid characters in this novel on both sides of the line between law and crime. Did they all develop from your imagination after your research of the Thai scene, particularly the crime and sex worlds, or from people you met, or are they entirely figments of your imagination?

A. The characters themselves tend to use real people as starting points, which are by no means exclusively Thai. The Thai-Chinese pharmacist, for example, was inspired by a Hong Kong Chinese woman I once worked with as a lawyer in Hong Kong long before I came to live in Thailand.

Q. I have read that you worked in Hong Kong in the legal profession for some years, and Hong Kong immediately summons up a stereotype picture of ‘business, business, business’. Does Hong Kong life also have a deeper dimension quite apart from the ‘business’ element, or were you attracted to write about Thailand, not Hong Kong, because it is so different?

A. Hong Kong differs from Thailand both in reality and in the popular imagination because Hong Kong has such a strong ‘British’ side to it, even today. Thailand has never been colonised and has held onto its very strong, centralised culture through both British and Japanese colonisation of the surrounding countries. Therefore the image of the ‘exotic East’ is much more clearly defined when one writes about Bangkok as compared with Hong Kong. On the other hand, Hong Kong does have a deeper, and less penetrable, aspect. Hong Kong Chinese tend to have kept their Confucian traditions and I have called on these somewhat in building the Chinese characters in Godfather.

Q. According to Wikipedia, you would like to move beyond the crime field once the Bangkok series is completed. Is this so, or have you not yet decided where the writing path will lead you? It seems to me that in The Godfather of Kathmandu you are already moving the boundaries of crime fiction determinedly outwards. I was impressed that the murder of the American was the focal point of what is a much wider canvas; it didn’t dominate the novel to the extent that its whys and wherefores outshadowed the overall Asian scene, both criminal and spiritual. Would you want to leave crime behind altogether or go further along the path you’re already treading? I realise this may be a tough question to answer, however, when you’re not yet finished with Sonchai and Bangkok – at least I hope you’re not.

A. I am not sure. In the past two books I have realised how flexible and open-ended the crime thriller form can be. I shall probably continue to experiment and to stretch the form as far as it will go. Who knows, it might develop into a genre of its own: the mystic thriller?

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