My Reviews
Casting a Critical Eye Over Other Books
Eulogy for William Warren, the Dean of All Expat Authors in Thailand
Over five decades in the kingdom, William Warren, a friend to both Jim Thompson and the most famous expat murdered in Bangkok in the 1960s, produced more than 50 books and hundreds of articles, writes Jim Algie, before his death in 2017. When I first arrived in...
Sunthorn Phu: The Shakespeare of Siam
The birthday of Thailand’s most revered writer on June 26 is an occasion for performances of the work of Sunthorn Phu and remembrances of his legacy, writes Jim Algie in the June 2019 issue of Sawasdee. Looking around the Sunthorn Phu Memorial Park in Rayong province...
Thriller by T. Hunt Locke Bounces Between Bangkok and Boston
T. Hunt Locke has mixed two of his paramount pastimes – history and thrillers – into an intoxicating highball, writes Jim Algie. The prologue flashes back to the American War of Independence, the siege of Boston and the Suffolk Resolves, when we’re introduced to the...
The Anti-Aging Guide to Travelling Gracefully
Travel as an anti-aging agent is a persistent theme in this absorbing memoir. Throughout her witty and adeptly written travel memoirs, Janet Brown has taken the adage that “life is a journey” to a multifaceted extreme. In previous books, she has led readers through...
Different Drummers book review: The Offbeat Generation of Bangkok
Meet some of the expat authors, musicians and a painter who have helped to make Bangkok into an international hideaway for mavericks and outliers with a creative bent. Review by Jim Algie One of the first expats I met in Bangkok was a fellow teacher at my school. He...
Behind the Crime Scenes with the Bestselling Bangkok 8 Author John Burdett
Before publishing his breakthrough book Bangkok 8, and five later entries in the series, John Burdett lived a life of novel-worthy plot twists among hippies in Europe, the criminal underclass in London, and the Hong Kong elite. By Jim Algie Of all the paths that lead...
Comical Crime Caper Set in Hollywood by Timothy Hallinan
The fifth book in the Junior Bender Mystery series brings together a compelling a cast of characters in a Hollywood thriller by Timothy Hallinan, writes Jim Algie in this review from Bangkok 101 magazine. Fans of Thailand-based novels will know the name Timothy...
George Orwell Brigade Reclaims His Turf
The spirit of George Orwell, and his writings in 1984 and Animal Farm, is alive and giving hell to amoral authoritarians everywhere in this new anthology In a digital age and so-called “post-truth” era of fake news, when attenuated attention spans have...
Love, Murder and Rohingya Refugee Crisis in Bangkok and Burma
Christopher G. Moore’s Vincent Calvino series is not only a fine collection of finely calibrated mysteries; it’s also a chronicle of many major upheavals – political, criminal, pathological and even psychosexual – which have upset Southeast Asia over the last two...
Bangkok Noir: The Tell-Tale Art
Crime and corruption, hookers and hitmen, the new anthology Bangkok Noir makes a case for hardboiled crime fiction in the Thai capital with bullet points. Jim Algie reads you their writes In the middle of 2011, some eight years after the Thai government’s “War on...
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