Inside Story with Humphrey

Samuel Tay has worked almost his entire life as a senior homicide detective in Singapore. He's a little overweight, a little lonely, a little cranky, and he smokes way too much, but he’s the best investigator anyone there has ever seen.  Across Asia, Jack Shepherd, once a high-flyer in Washington’s inner circles of power, now lives in a borrowed apartment in Hong Kong, working from an unmarked office to solve the problems his big-money clients don’t want anyone else to know they have. These two great characters are the creation of Jake Needham described by one critic as ‘Asia’s most stylish and atmospheric writer of crime fiction.’  Jake is an American and began his career as a screen and television writer but realized he didn’t really like movies and television that much and turned his hand to crime novels based in Asia. His work has been compared the Michael Connelly and Raymond Chandler, but in a self-deprecating he flags up a magazine quote of him as ‘the best-known American writer almost no-one in America has heard of.’  He has homes in Washington and Bangkok and pointedly stakes his ground, saying, “The romantic notion of the American expatriate novelist living an exciting life in some exotic land pretty much disappeared nearly a century ago when Hemingway and Fitzgerald fled Paris, but there are still a few of us out there.” Meet Jake Needham in conversation with Humphrey Hawksley at 12.00 British time, Friday October 14, on Goldster Inside Story.