About The Author
Jack Reynolds was born Emrys Reynolds Jones on 19 June 1913 in Hertfordshire in the south of England, the son of a non-conformist minister. Later at school in north London, he became known as Jack Jones, which is Cockney rhyming slang for a loner. His father wanted him to follow in his footsteps into the church but he rebelled and led a wandering life moving from job to job as a fish trimmer on a North Sea trawler, a sampler in a Lincolnshire sugar beet factory, a monumental mason and market gardener. To relieve the tedium of low paid jobs he was also a speedway racer, chancing his arm for one of the north London teams, and he wrote some fine poems, in 1937 aged only twenty four publishing a book of his own poetry. The parallels with Reginald Ernest Joyce, the anti-hero of his novel, are very apparent.
At the beginning of the Second World War Jack registered as a conscientious objector and was excused war service on condition he work on the land in food production or relief work with the Friends Ambulance Unit. Continuing as a market gardener, in March 1944 he joined the FAU, training as a medic, driver and mechanic and on 3rd September 1945, the day after the Japanese surrender, he sailed for China. There he spent almost six years with the FAU, distributing medical supplies over vast distances in appalling conditions. He survived a near fatal bout of typhus fever, plunged sixty feet into a ravine when his truck ran off the road and was captured and beaten by bandits. As the FAU’s West China Director based in Chungking he led a team of western and Chinese workers, in 1950 opening a clinic to serve the local population. During this time he was constantly active as a writer, producing blog-like articles for the weekly FAU newsletter, a hoard of which has recently been unearthed in archives in London and Philadelphia. His experiences in China inspired his later book, Daughters of an Ancient Race published in 1974, a series of stories of the hard lives of the women he treated in his Chungking clinic.
Held under house arrest by the communists, he finally reached Hong Kong in June 1951 after a gruelling journey down the Yangtze river and by train. There he landed a job as a transport manager with UNICEF in Thailand and in August sailed for Bangkok. With no wish to return to England, he met and married a Catholic Thai much to his parents’ dismay and raised a family of seven children.
Travelling widely throughout Thailand for UNICEF, Jack had time on his hands to write while in seedy hotels in dusty rural towns, and so his novel was born to immediate acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Nonetheless, despite his prodigious and versatile talent as a writer, he failed to produce another one. He put this down to his commitment to his large family, though, as he wrote to a friend, the manuscript of a second novel was lost when it slipped from his grasp while crossing a river in a small boat. It fell into the water and was eaten by a crocodile.
When his UNICEF contract came to an end in 1959, he took a further UN contract in Jordan, accompanied by his family until the political situation there became too dangerous. Leaving Jordan in 1967, he worked for the Bangkok Post and other journals as writer and editor, sandwiched between further unaccompanied postings with the UN in the Far East and Africa. He finally returned to journalism in Bangkok in the Seventies and was a favourite contributor of articles on a range of local topics with a strong popular following in Thailand. His principal resource was of course a rich fund of stories from a life time of extraordinary adventures in China and his years of arduous relief work in far-flung places.
Not long before his death, he told an interviewer that he was still working on the book that would be his masterpiece and he continued dreaming of literary acclaim to the end. On his death aged 71 in Bangkok on 2nd September 1984, the Bangkok Post published several warm tributes to ‘Bangkok’s grand old man of letters’. Writing was Jack’s passion and he should be reassured that an author needs only one outstanding book to be remembered and celebrated, as this new edition now affirms.
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Thai Girl
ANDREW HICKS
When travellers Ben and Emma come to blows on the idyllic Thai island of Koh Samet, it’s not long before Ben falls for Fon, a flirtatious but enigmatic beach masseuse, and is forced to come to terms with the darker side of tourism in Thailand.
As Ben parties on the beaches with travellers from around the world and experiences the raunchy nightlife of Bangkok, he is drawn deeper into the harsh reality of his island paradise. The closer he is to Fon, the sparkling Thai girl of his dreams, the more he realizes what it means to be truly poor and what drives farmers’ daughters away from their homes to sell their bodies in the bars of Bangkok.
On the surface Thai Girl is an endearing romantic adventure novel; at another level it explores some of the disturbing issues affecting a fast-developing country and its people as well as the problems associated with cross-cultural relationships. Hicks weaves a gripping and thought-provoking narrative that reaches its climax in the sultry heat of Thailand’s exotic traveller beaches. This novel is available from Monsoon Books in paperback form and as an ebook.
My Thai Girl And I
How I found a new life in Thailand
ANDREW HICKS
This is about how Andrew Hicks met Cat, a ‘Thai girl’ half his age and how they set up home together in her village out in the rice fields of North Eastern Thailand.
Andrew will tell you of toads in the toilet, of ants’ eggs for breakfast, how they took up frog farming and how he got married without really meaning to.
It’s also a book about the countryside, of the old Thailand where the rhythm of the seasons and belief in the spirits and Buddhism remain strong.
How could he, a greying English lawyer, ever fit into the lives of a Thai rice farming family? Can Cat and Andrew with their many differences really be compatible?
Escape
The true story of the only Westerner ever to break out of Thailand’s Bangkok Hilton
DAVID MCMILLAN
Klong Prem prison, Thailand. The “Bangkok Hilton”, where 600 foreigners among the 12,000 inmates of this walled prison city also wait and rot. Among the tragic, ruthless and forgotten, one man resolves to do what no other has done: escape. This is the true story of drug smuggler David McMillan’s perilous break-out from Asia’s most notorious prison.
“Breathtaking stuff” News of the World, UK
“Gripping” Zoo Weekly, UK
“Drug trafficker David McMillan … spent two years plotting his escape from a Bangkok jail” BBC, UK
“The jailbreak was straight out of a movie” The Age, Australia
“This is one of the world’s most notorious—and remarkable—heroin traffickers: Melbourne man David McMillan. Despite still being on the run, McMillan has written a book, Escape, about … his amazing breakout in Bangkok” The Australian
Escape: The Past
Prequel to the international bestseller “Escape: The true story of the only Westerner ever to break out of Thailand’s Bangkok Hilton”
DAVID MCMILLAN
In this gripping prequel to “Escape”, drug smuggler-turned-bestselling author David McMillan tells it from the beginning. Throwing away an expensive education as a teenager then a promising executive career, McMillan hit rock bottom only to shake off the dust from the dirt-floor warehouse that was his home to make his first million dealing drugs at age
22.
McMillan peels away the layers of seedy Patpong’s massive candy-store brothels as he scours the Thai capital’s lowest dives seeking bosses with strong connections and weak ethics. He details what it took to arm himself and his teams of couriers with dozens of passports to tread the clandestine path that frustrated international border guards for years.
Memories of the New York highlife, London’s Mayfair townhouses and Concorde’s soft landings soon fade, however, when the law eventually catches up with the young villain in Australia. Following a six-month Supreme Court trial with 126 witnesses, McMillan is sent down for a long stretch yet he still hits the headlines from behind bars with a failed helicopter breakout.
Bangkok Hard Time
The surreal true story of how a Western teenager came of age in 1960s Bangkok, turned international drug smuggler and walked the prison yards of Thailand’s notorious “Bangkok Hilton”
JON COLE
It is 1967 Bangkok, the Summer of Love, and for teenager Jon Cole, son of a US Green Beret colonel serving in the Vietnam War, life as a young Westerner in the City of Angels is sweeter than mangoes on sticky rice with coconut milk … until he is introduced to the infamous House of Lek. Drawn to the underbelly of Bangkok, the International School Bangkok pupil soon discovers ganja, opium and the two-dollar bordellos.
What follows is a surreal but true story of one Westerner’s relationship with Thailand spanning four decades. A drug habit picked up at the House of Lek with schoolmates and GIs on R&R from Vietnam leads to a career as a drug smuggler, a nasty smack habit and, ultimately, a long stretch inside Bangkok’s notorious prison, the “Bangkok Hilton”.
Nightmare in Bangkok
The incredible true account of survival in a Thai prison
ANDY BOTTS
Andy Botts began his criminal activities as a young “car banger” in his native Hawaii before graduating to drug-dealing and trafficking. After a number of successful and highly lucrative drug runs to Asia (though not without some chillingly close calls), Botts was betrayed by a close associate. Arrested in Bangkok’s Don Muang International Airport with 114 grams of heroin in his possession, he narrowly escaped execution by firing squad.
But his “reprieve”—a prison sentence of life plus two years in Bangkok’s most notorious prison, dubbed the Bangkok Hilton’—threw him into a nightmare world where the only rules were no rules. Nightmare in Bangkok is Botts’ all-too-true account of how he managed to survive this ordeal and emerge a very changed man at the end of a fearsome journey through hell.
“In Thailand, Botts gets jailed for heroin smuggling, but not before being incarcerated in his native Hawaii” TIME, USA
Confessions Of A Bangkok Private
Eye
True stories from the case files of Warren Olson
WARREN OLSON & STEPHEN LEATHER
‘Two-timing bargirls, suspicious spouses and lesbian lovers – it was all in a day’s work for Bangkok Private Eye Warren Olson.’
For more than a decade Olson walked the mean streets of the Big Mango. Fluent in Thai and Khamen, he was able to go where other Private Eyes feared to tread.
His clients included Westerners who had lost their hearts – and life savings – to money-hungry bargirls. Nobody knows more than Warren Olson about the tricks that bargirls can use to separate Western men from their hard-earned money. But he had more than his fair share of Thai clients, too, including a sweet old lady who was ripped off by a Christian conman and a Thai girl blackmailed by a former lover.
The stories are based on Olson’s case files, fictionalised (to protect the innocent, and the guilty) by bestselling author Stephen Leather.
Thai Private Eye
WARREN OLSON
For more than a decade, the intrepid Warren Olson trawled the mean streets of Bangkok and the lesser-known corners of the Land of Smiles. His brief? To uncover unsavoury truths about Thai bargirl lovers, philandering spouses, insurance fraud and scam artists of various stripes. He was a private eye prying into nooks and crannies few dared to explore and, along the way, he uncovered fascinating secrets of Thais and foreigners engaged in no good.
This volume—the follow-up to Stephen Leather and Warren Olson’s bestselling Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye—serves up more juicy portions of what goes on under the veneer in Thailand and includes stories deemed too hot to include in the first book for fear of repercussions. It also includes recent cases, where state-of-the-art surveillance devices and other advances in the dark arts of private investigation have made it easier to uncover dirt deep below the surface. This is a book that reads like exciting fiction, with one big difference: every story is true. Only the names and related identifying details have been changed to protect the innocent along with the guilty. These chronicles of a decade lived dangerously in the Land of Crooked Smiles will, by turns, entertain, shock, inflame and inform you.
Copyright
First published in 1956 as “A Sort of Beauty” by Secker & Warburg Ltd.
This electronic edition first published in 2012 by Monsoon Books
Reprint edition published in 2011 by Monsoon Books
ISBN (paperback): 978-981-08-5430-0
ISBN (ebook): 978-981-4358-62-0
Copyright©Jack Reynolds, 1956
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
The publishers are grateful to the Estate of Jack Reynolds and Random House UK (Secker & Warburg) for their assistance.
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Cover design by Opalworks
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Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Contents
Praise For A Woman of Bangkok
Part One
One
Two
Three
Four
Part Two
Five
Six
Seven
Part Three
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
About The Author
About Monsoon Books
Thai Girl
My Thai Girl And I
Escape
Escape: The Past
Bangkok Hard Time
Nightmare In Bangkok
Confessions Of A Bangkok Private Eye
Thai Private Eye
Copyright Page
A Woman of Bangkok Page 38