STOP PRESS Dave Kendall, the former creator and host of the MTV alt.rock show  “120 Minutes,” has passed away at the age of 63 in Bali. No official cause of death has been given. His legacy as a groundbreaking VJ, who first aired the video for “Smells like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana and interviewed Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails for a bizarre Christmas show on the music video channel, is all over Youtube. During his career working with the Bangkok Post, among his many achievements, Dave hosted the Deeper Dive podcast, focusing on everything from environmental issues to expat income tax and how USAID cuts adversely affected philanthropic efforts in Thailand. 

I never knew Dave before he wrote the following review of my short-story collection in the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, Asia´s biggest English daily, in early 2015, but that was how we met. I sent him a thank-you note. He responded in kind. We struck up a correspondence, discovered a multitude of commonalities and became caffeine buddies. I was always pleasantly surprised by his modesty. He had every reason to become one of the self-aggrandizing, social-media whores, but elected to spend a lot of time mentoring younger journalists, doing a master´s degree in journalism from a Scottish university and serving on the Board of Directors for the Foreign Correspondent´s Club of Thailand during the pandemic.

Later, we discovered another bond: We we both working on issues related to wildlife conversation and the environment. In a testament to his affinity with these subjects that his last project was working on a website called Livestock Climate Facts, to highlight his advocacy work on climate change, which was also the subject of his master´s thesis. Tired of urban blight and bored of city life, he divided his later years between northern Thailand and Bali.

This image captures Dave Kendall, as many will remember him, from hosting 120 Minutes (dig the Killing Joke t-shirt) and during his Thailand days.

Much as we might like to hope for “rainbow bridges,” which we cross to reunite with all our lost pets and heavenly reunions with loved ones that last for eternity, Dave Kendall was, above all else, a journalist who dealt in cold, hard facts not well-meaning fantasies. The fact is: Life either goes on for too long or not long enough. Cut short at 63, Dave´s life in the latter category.

While we can celebrate the Briton´s many achievements, as duly chronicled by The New York Times in this obit, we can also mourn all the plans and projects of his that will remain stillborn, like his last transformation into an environmentalist, which was in the chrysalis stage but quite burst of out of cocoon in the butterfly fashion, though the websites live on as a digital tombstone.

Since it is getting close to the Dia de Muertos here in Mexico, as well as Halloween and the Catholic All Soul´s Day, I will be inviting Dave´s sonic spirit to the festivities, which is easy to conjure online.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hMfRikIT47g

And so are the heartfelt tributes from people on the MTV page, like Joe Guillotin, “MTV – could you put all the episodes up on YouTube as a tribute? I don’t think this generation can properly understand the influence this man has on us.”

The following review was written by Dave under one of his pseudonyms for the SCMP. As he explained it to me, he did not want his journalism to be confused with his VJ work. Nor did he want his own celebrity to overshadow whatever or whoever else he was writing about.

Book review: The Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand – chills for thrills

By Dave Kendall

Asian horror fiction is an expanding, yet still relatively unknown genre. Its rise follows the trend for Southeast Asia noir, and an increasing number of movies that use Bangkok’s sultry streets as a backdrop for tales of crime and the supernatural. But Jim Algie’s short-story collection, The Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand, aims to go further, tapping into the deep vein of superstition that runs through Thai society and blurring the line between precarious reality and a disturbing dream world.

Algie’s stories are not for the squeamish. A failed snake handler, body disfigured by cobra bites, ruminates on life’s disappointments, while a Bangkok bar girl takes out one of her customers’ eyes with her stiletto heel. Most gruesome of all, a high-society model and actress undergoes an interrupted abortion, leading to a nightmarish tale of abandoned foetuses, a bird-eating spider and prayers to arcane medieval spirits.

Some of the stories are inspired by true-life crimes that still resonate today. Algie’s account of an immigrant rickshaw driver from Hainan turned notorious serial killer, who cannibalised his victims in 1950s Bangkok, doesn’t pull any punches.

Yet for all the surface shock, and occasionally clumsy prose, Algie is attempting something more sophisticated. His stories read almost as fictionalised journalism, as if mere reportage cannot convey the multiple layers of Thai society that are mostly shrouded from outside eyes, or adequately reveal the true nature of the lives of the foreign chancers, and worse, who are drawn to Thailand.

Algie makes this explicit in Tsunami, the concluding story, which feeds off his own experiences working as a journalist and then a volunteer on a Thai island hit by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. He takes some bitter swipes at the short attention span of today’s media, and the agenda of official aid agencies.

Tsunami brings together the most memorable characters from some of the preceding pieces – the Bangkok hooker who attempts to keep her unsavoury world at bay with her Buddhist beliefs, two burned-out journalists, the one-time snake handler – and weaves their fates together in a mostly effective and satisfactory fashion. Like the best of the writing in the collection, it’s lifted by the fact that Algie knows Thailand intimately, and is both stern and sympathetic with his damaged characters.

At times, the book feels like a lament for the Thailand Algie moved to in 1992, which is now long gone. He manages to be both clear-eyed and nostalgic in his descriptions of the unchecked boom town Bangkok was before the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

But The Phantom Lover is above all a horror show. Fans of the genre will be satisfied, while for everyone else the stories offer an authentic, illuminating and often unsettling ride through Thailand’s underbelly.

Read the review on the newspaper’s website here.

For the Halloween season of 2026, The Phantom Lover is now available as a discounted paperback or ebook on Amazon.

The front cover blurb for the Phantom Lover was written by Bangkok 8 author John Burdett: “Many people write about Thailand these days, but very few have the depth and breadth of Jim Algie. With the persistence of a seasoned journalist and the skill of a born story-teller he takes us places and reveals truths that lesser authors cannot begin to match.”