Stephen Leather, Bangkok’s Most Immortal Expat Writer

Meet Stephen Leather, world-known author of thrillers and the the Bangkok bar girl saga “Private Dancer” – a book Stephen had to publish by himself, as his publisher overseas was not too happy with the rather explicit and brutally candid Bangkok bar scene content.

Stephen with the „perfect name Stephen Leather, great for a thriller author,” was born in Manchester. The former journalist has a „rather complicated relationship“ with a Thai woman and they have a child together, a daughter – a foreigner’s classic turn of events after Stephen’s long-standing affiliation with his adopted home Bangkok.

Stephen neither loves nor hates Bangkok – it’s just the place he has to be and where he can lock himself in for weeks to write and write. Stephen Leather’s pacy action novels frequently include themes of crime, imprisonment, military service, terrorism and the war against terror. Settings are typically London and the Far East. I met him in a Prakanong coffee shop. Get to know the man – and his take on Bangkok, the writing business and, yes, immortality.

Private Dancer is your most-known book here in Bangkok. You didn’t have to invent much for the book. It reads so real. Where did you get the characters from?

Jools Bar down at Sukhumvit Soi 4. The place has been there for 20 years. When you walked there back then everything was empty – except for Big Dave. But even then, things didn’t really happen the way they happen now. Private Dancer’s Big Ron is … take a wild guess. Private Dancer was kind of born there. It’s not my best sold book, but my most famous book in Thailand – translated by now into English, German, French, Swedish, Hungarian, Latvian … But I write thrillers, which are not yet translated into that many languages.

You’re quite a local. You know this little coffee shop here at Prakanong and arrive on the back of a motorcycle taxi. You’ve become a full Thai by now?

I first came here 24 years ago and have been here a lot in the last 9-10 years. Got a daughter here, but am based in Dublin with a flat in London and apartment in Bangkok at Thonglor. But wherever I am, I lock myself in and write every day. Usually I research three months for a book. Then for six months I write a bit every day. When I’m near the end I lock myself in and produce about 50,000 words in about four weeks.

Your relationship with Bangkok?

It’s just level, there’s no great affection to it, maybe because I’ve been here so long. I think and talk in Thai, my daughter is happy here.

Who’s the girl on the cover of Private Dancer?

She works at Angelwitch. Were there and couldn’t find a girl with the right hair. The hair had to go to the middle of the back but no further and it couldn’t be too short. That’s maybe five percent of the girls. Then the skin color. Most of the ones we saw were katoeys. She has a tattoo – photoshoped it. And we borrowed a razor from my hairdresser. Her hair was quite thin, but we managed. And you don’t show her face. We don’t want to. Then she can be anybody’s girl. It’s a clever cover. The blade is not for the killing of the guy. She uses it on herself. She spent her whole life being abused by men. She’s a condensation of what had happened to her.

What you detest, what you like about Bangkok?

Don’t like the pollution, your eyes start stinging. Traffic is still hellish. Sure we remember Bangkok before the Skytrain, but traffic is still bad. The food’s fine, basically everything is better than it was. I don’t have to haggle with taxi drivers anymore. Within three seconds they not gonna bother anymore. Tourists though are still abused.

Your retreats in the Big Mango?

I use Starbucks a lot. Got three of them at Thonglor!

There’s competition between you expat writers in Bangkok?

Daughters are more devious. At the age of 9-10 they bend the truth a little bit, you know she’s lying … We writers here? We’re not competitors at all. In Dublin I only know two writers. In London I know one. Here in Bangkok we all know and meet each other. Christopher (Moore) I see once a week, then I meet Jake Needham, Andrew Hicks … There’s not a trace of envy. My sales are anyway way bigger than all of them combined. I’m in a totally different league. Some sell a hundred books a month. I would sell a 100,000 of a new one.

Why did you drop a promising career as a journalist to become an author?

I was a staff journalist, worked in Hong Kong for the South China Morning Post and went back to the Times in London. It’s a question of money. For my book The Chinaman I got a stash of money and paid a lot of income tax back in Britain. I haven’t been a resident of the U.K. since 20 years.

How important is psychology for a writer? To read the places and characters correctly to write that gripping stuff?

It’s not psychology, but to empathize, to understand how someone is feeling. Put yourself into the head of your characters. And even more important, figure out how they talk. Because the way people talk is the way they feel. People don’t always finish sentences and talk about other things than they think. And sarcasm, very important. When I sit down I don’t know what the characters gonna say. Things take over. It would be great though to create a character like Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. Or Harry Potter. He’ll maybe not live forever, but in 500 years people are still reading Harry Potter.

Your most alive character?

Dan Shepherd has been in five books already, a special forces undercover cop, he develops a life of his own, but he’s not gonna be a character forever. Really strong characters are fantasy characters – take Harry Potter. It’s the fantasy. Everybody wants to be special. With his foster parents and real parents, then the mark – and he overcomes adversity. Sherlock Holmes has that something as well …

Sherlock Holmes was a cocaine addict … Are you producing literature Stephen?

Stories rather. I try to write as a journalist, with speed, short sentences – and never assumed I became immortal. My uncle was a writer. He died 25 years ago. Within a year of his death all his works were forgotten. The day I die they sell whatever is left in the warehouse. When no yearly new novel comes they’ll forget me. Private dancer though will survive as long as there are go-go bars. This book will explain why what happens.

The grand novel you want to but will never write?

I could have written Harry Potter – it’s fairly simple story. There is nothing in that book I could not have written. Or the Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown did not set out to make five million dollars. I mean, you don’t try to sit down to write a book that is here forever. You just sit down and try to write your best book.

Difficulties getting up in the morning and staring at the empty paper, ehm, screen?

I got a number of tricks. There is the writer’s block when you don’t know where to take the story. I got friends who are writers, I talk them through the plot – they will say I can do this or that. That helps as a kind of unblocking, but happens very rarely. Not wanting to write is more a problem. Sometimes I don’t have the enthusiasm. Or take scenes, like a character goes from here to there, 300-400 words, you know it’s gonna be boring, so what I do, I save up the killing or a torture scene or a fight. When I feel losing enthusiasm, it’s time for that killing or torture or fight. I produce adrenaline. 3-4 pages will take 3-4 days of work.

You stick with books? Or how important is the online world for you with its instant feedback features, such as blogging?

Now and then I write other things and publish it on Stickman. Or I might write a piece for a magazine. That’s a more relaxing writing and easy to switch back to the book. I very rarely get blocked and do live in my own world. When I’m under real pressure, but 400 words a day over a year is easy. Under 1,000 words a day I got a safety net. My target is to have enough days to still be over the limit. I plan my books with about a 120,000 words. It always takes an extra of 20,000 words.

And you know where the book ends when you start writing?

When the writing begins, I have no idea how a story ends. The story grows organic, you know approximately where it goes. But somehow in my subconscious all is sorted out. Sometimes I just sleep on it. Before I sleep I think about it. When I wake up it’s solved.

You lock yourself in while working – how?!

I work with running television. I can’t watch comedies or something that makes me laugh. Discovery Channel is perfect, or National Geographic. Stops me getting bored while writing. Otherwise it’s impossible to get bored. I can sit for hours in a plane and not do anything – and don’t get bored. It’s all there in your mind, that’s all there is. Like, I’ve been to many prisons, where I talk about my work and books. In return, I ask the inmates about their lives. The ones with long sentences live in the same world. Like the murderer, he owned that bar in the Caribbean. In his mind, he can make things real. He’s there serving the drinks seeing the surfers. That’s what my mind is. The fantasy world can be stronger than the real world.

+++ You may also want to read our Novelist Burdett: Mission Soi Cowboy and Bangkok’s (S)expat Writers.




Sphere: Related Content

Related posts on absolutelyBangkok.com:

  1. Expat Women’s Voice
  2. Chris Coles’ Bangkok Vanilla Sky
  3. Bangkok Poetization
  4. Sorta Henry Miller? Lawrence Osborne’s Vulgar-Prose “Bangkok Days”
  5. Calvino Is Back
  6. Navigating The Bangkok Night

April 12, 2008 | Filed Under Being Farang, Culture & Arts, The Interview 

Comments

3 Responses to “Stephen Leather, Bangkok’s Most Immortal Expat Writer”

  1. atmcharlie on May 4th, 2008 10.34 am

    You cannot be most immortal. Not in English anyway.
    Ask Stephen.

  2. BangkokDan on May 4th, 2008 10.46 am

    Noted, but “most” implies a negation of “immortal.”

    It’s “to a greater extent immortal,” – read as “not more than mortal.”

    Immortal in itself is an absolute term, the adverb “more” rendering it “less absolute.”

    BangkokDan

  3. Paul Booth on June 25th, 2009 8.47 pm

    Stephen Leather always seems very modest about his achievements. I see his books in supermarkets and he has a whole shelf in some book shops. His audience is more global than the other Bangkok writers and I would imagine he is considerably richer. How wonder how rich he is?

Leave a Reply