Tom Vater is the latest author to undergo some gentle questioning.
Tom's latest book - The Monsoon Ghost Image was featured on the blog yesterday - here.
Can you give us a quick biography of yourself?
From what I little I know, you’re a German national, with
a strong connection to Asia. You run a well-respected indie publishing house –
Crime Wave Press – you write fiction and non-fiction in the form of travel
guides and more. What don’t you do?
Ah, yes, that is my quick bio,
thanks, Col. You saved me all the heavy lifting. To add to that briefly… I have walked across the Himalayas, had the opportunity to
dive with hundreds of sharks in the Philippines, and witnessed the Maha Kumbh
Mela, the largest gathering of people in the world. I have travelled with sea
gypsies and nomads, pilgrims, sex workers, serial killers, rebels and soldiers,
politicians and secret agents, artists, pirates, hippies, gangsters, policemen
and prophets. Some of them have become close friends. Others appear in the
articles and books I write.
I am a journalist specialising in
South and Southeast Asia. I’ve also written a bunch of non-fiction books
including bestsellers like Sacred Skin (www.sacredskinthailand.com) and several
feature documentaries. That’s the day job which I love. But I got into all this
because I wanted to write fiction. I wrote my first novel, The Devil’s Road to
Kathmandu, just as I was starting off in journalism.
I don’t jump out of planes, I don’t
eat sea food. I don’t take my hat off.
With your author hat on….
What’s your typical writing schedule?
I generally get up late morning,
do some sports, go shopping, get home before 3pm and start working. I tend to
work through to 2am with a dinner break when needed. Then I wind down for an
hour or two before crashing out. I can go for weeks like this. But I also often
go on assignments – this year I have worked in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, India
and Nepal – when I am on the road I tend to get up earlier – the world does not
wait on mid-day writers.
When you have an idea and you sit down to construct your
story – do you know what the end result is roughly going to look like? Are you
a plotter, or do you make it up as you go along?
Both. I write an outline, some
character details of the main protagonists. I rewrite the outline, refine it,
etc. Then, when I start writing the text I do everything possible to stick as
close to the outline as I can but the characters often revolt, the story
changes direction and once it does it’s like a set of falling dominoes, a
journey to another place.
Maybe writing is a bit like war.
As soon as the first shot is fired, carefully made plans go to shit – savagery
and survival are everything.
Are there any subjects off limits? (From reading your
latest, I guess not.)
The Detective Maier series looks
at our recent history through the eyes of a German detective and former
conflict journalist in Asia. That’s not nearly as obscure as it sounds. Asia
has been repeatedly destroyed by European and American diplomacy and politics –
from the British and French colonial occupations to the Americans’ absurd mass
slaughter in Vietnam and Maier gets to dissect our collective deeds out East.
Asia provides an opportunity to put the western claim to humane exceptionalism
to the test. So obviously history and geopolitics is what I have been
interested in. The white man in Asia thing. I also try increasingly to take the
gap between the rich and the poor on board in my novels as it determines so
much of our behaviour. My characters come from diverse countries and sexual
orientations. Seems normal to me. I use swear words, not too much, just a
little. I suppose outright comedy has been off limits so far… you know Germans
go to the basement to laugh…
I’ve enjoyed your latest The Monsoon Ghost Image recently.
How long from conception to completion did it take?
The Monsoon Ghost Image took a
couple of years to put together.
Was it a smooth process or were there many bumps in the
road along the way?
I wanted to bring Maier forward
into our most recent history. The first book in the series, The Cambodian Book
of the Dead, dealt with the Cambodian genocide, through the eyes of a German
(as I recently read that a significant number of Europeans and Americans don’t
know what the Germans did in WWII, I emphasize here that the latter is
significant). The second book, The Man with the Golden Mind, looked at the
CIA’s largest operation to date, the secret war in Laos, which the Americans
lost, along with every other war they have started and fought since WWII.
Kissinger makes an appearance in that one. Both those books were first
published by Exhibit A and sold pretty well. When Exhibit A went under, I went
into a depressive funk and concentrated on my day job for a couple of years
before tackling The Monsoon Ghost Image properly.
What was the spark of imagination that got you started on
TMGI?
I am based in Thailand. In the
early 2000s, the US tortured several Muslim terror suspects here. Water
boarding, rectal feeding tubes, the whole works. For me, that was and is the
end of the end of the end of America’s foreign policy. It is time the US went
home and cleaned up its own house, stop killing innocents abroad, starving
millions of kids to death as they do in Yemen right now. So that provided a
great hook. I also felt the need to finally write a novel set in Thailand, to
kind of make peace with my home, to take the opportunity to reflect on how some
foreigners live in this country.
Did the final result mirror the book you were striving for
at the start of the journey?
Yes, it is bleak and reflects my
political philosophy quite well – that we are completely screwed by
corporations and rich people, that the poor always get fucked and killed and
that democracy and human rights are fig leaves to hide our moral turpitude.
In the book we have dual locations of Thailand and
Germany. Is it important for you to have a connection to the settings that you
write about?
Incredibly important. I used to
refuse on principle to write any scene set somewhere I have not been. I am not
that dogmatic anymore. I recently published my first crime fiction story in
French, with French co-author Laure Siegel, in the magazine Ecoute. Troubled
Waters is a story about shark attacks killing the tourist business in La
Reunion, a French island near Madagascar. I have never been to La Reunion. But
I do know how to put a story together, know a little bit about sharks, and
Laure had been to the location and made sure we got the local colour just
right. But generally I have been to all the locations featured in my fiction at
some point in my life.
At the end of TMGI you seem to indicate that Detective
Maier’s race is run. I felt a certain ambiguity about the ending. Are you sure
you can’t tempt him out of retirement for a 4th outing?
Well, well. I did start writing
the beginning of a short story which had Maier waking up in some remote Asian
location, not knowing how he got there or even why he was still alive…
Can you tell us a bit about your two earlier books in the
series – The Cambodian Book of the Dead and The Man with The Golden Mind?
The Cambodian Book of the Dead:
I’ve spent a lot of time in Cambodia, especially
in the early 2000s, observing a country re-emerging from a half century of war,
genocide, famine and cultural collapse.
In the novel, German Detective Maier travels to
Phnom Penh, the Asian kingdom’s ramshackle capital, to find the heir to a
Hamburg coffee empire. As soon as the private eye and former war reporter
arrives in Cambodia, his search for the young coffee magnate leads into the
darkest corners of the country’s history and back in time, through the
communist revolution to the White Spider, a Nazi war criminal who hides amongst
the detritus of another nation’s collapse and reigns over an ancient Khmer
temple deep in the jungles of Cambodia. Maier, captured and imprisoned, is
forced into the worst job of his life – he is to write the biography of the
White Spider, a tale of mass murder that reaches from the Cambodian Killing
Fields back to Europe’s concentration camps – or die.
By looking at the tragedy and cruelty of 70s
Cambodia, I also was able to look at my own country’s past crimes against
humanity, to put the history of my country in some sort of focus. This idea is
quite controversial in Germany but because I left more than thirty years ago, I
like to think that I have freed myself from some opinions or attitudes that
Germans who live in Germany today might not be able to question. In any case,
with the Internet, time is moving so fast and the meaning of history and the
past is changing so quickly, that the opinions of a German of my generation who
left his country a long time ago, may not be easily understandable for my
country women and men.
The Man with the Golden Mind:
The second book came about because I co-wrote a
documentary called The Most Secret Place on Earth, about the CIA’s covert campaign
in Laos in the 60s and 70s, the largest CIA campaign to date as far as we know.
The agency tried to contain communist forces by supporting opposing reactionary
forces in Laos, by recruiting a secret army of illiterate ethnic minority
people, including many children, most of whom got killed, by carpet bombing the
country for nine years and finally by losing it all to the communists who were
better motivated, more intelligent and who were fighting for their homeland,
not some place 8000 miles away. America has this amazing knack to go to poor
countries, kill everyone, still lose the conflict they started, cease to
remember why they started it, and then go home and sell it as a victory to its
people. And all of us in the West grew up with this.
In The Man with the Golden Mind, Julia Rendel
asks Detective Maier to investigate the twenty-five year old murder of her
father, an East German cultural attaché who was killed near a fabled CIA
airbase in central Laos in 1976.
But before the detective can set off, his client
is kidnapped right out of his arms.
Maier follows Julia’s trail to the Laotian capital Vientiane, where he learns
different parties, including his missing client, are searching for a legendary
CIA file crammed with Cold War secrets.
But the real prize is the file’s author, a man
codenamed Weltmeister, a former US and Vietnamese spy and assassin no one has
seen for a quarter century.
And as I mentioned earlier, the novel features a
cameo by Henry Kissinger, one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century.
And your non-series fiction novel – The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu?
I’ve just been back to Kathmandu.
Time waits for no one and the city, post-earthquake and civil war, is barely
recognizable. But the novel is still in print, in English and in Spanish, and I
occasionally get readers’ letters about how much they loved it. It lacks the
heavy historical dimension of the Maier novels. It is, for the most part, a
boys’ adventure romp set in exotic locales, which, I am told, are brought to
life in expert fashion.
The plot is straightforward enough. In 1976,
four friends, Dan, Fred, Tim and Thierry, drive a bus along the hippie trail
from London to Kathmandu. En Route in Pakistan, a drug deal goes badly wrong,
yet the boys escape with their lives and the narcotics. Thousands of
kilometers, numerous acid trips, accidents, nightclubs and a pair of beautiful
Siamese twins later, as they finally reach the counter-culture capital of the
world, Kathmandu, Fred disappears with the drug money. A quarter century later,
after receiving mysterious emails inviting them to pick up their share of the
money, Dan, Tim and Thierry are back in Kathmandu. The Nepalese capital is not
the blissful mountain backwater they remember. Soon a trail of kidnapping and murder
leads across the Roof of the World. With the help of Dan’s backpacking son, a
tattooed lady and a Buddhist angel, the ageing hippies try to solve a 25-year
old mystery that leads them amongst Himalayan peaks for a dramatic showdown
with their past. The Bangkok Post called it “a better backpacker read than The
Beach.” Ahem.
Do you favour one of your books over the other? Which
would you press into the hands of a new reader?
I
am pretty happy to have written all four of the novels. When I meet new potential
readers I always recommend my most recent book. If I think they might not be
able to stomach that, then it is The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu, I suppose,
though the commissioning editor at Harper Collins India told me many years ago
when I tried to pitch the book to them, that my story was too immoral to be
considered for publication. I guess some folks might say that about The Monsoon
Ghost Image, as well.
What’s been the most satisfying moment of your writing
career so far?
Waking up this morning, with a
roof over my head, the bills paid, and time to fill this here page. It’s been a
great, infuriating, frustrating, illuminating, wonderful ride so far.
Any unpublished gems in your bottom drawer?
I’ve just finished a short story
called To Kill an Arab which will be out in February in a crime/horror fiction
anthology edited by Chris Roy and Andy Rausch in the US, which will also
feature several well-known American authors. And I am working on a second
French language novella with Laure Siegel, set in 1940s French-occupied
Cambodia.
Any advice for prospective authors out there?
The fiction market is declining,
it’s hard to sell a book. Only old people still read. If you have a story to
tell, then don’t be discouraged, but do look which platform suits your idea the
best. If there is another way to put it out there, to find an audience for it,
then that might be worth considering – perhaps as a movie, TV series, a youtube
channel, a play or a radio show, who knows?
What’s the best thing about writing?
It’s my job but often it doesn’t
feel like a job, more like something that gives meaning to my life and the
world. It’s both so very serious and so totally ridiculous. I mean, sitting in
a room alone for months on end. Who does that?
The worst?
Not having a regular income as a
professional and lifestyle choice has been a challenge from time to time,
especially when I first started writing.
What are the last five books you’ve read?
Just finished Megan Abbot’s You
Will Know Me which I found intriguing but also curiously devoid of relevance
beyond its immediate narrative. Before that I raced through A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif, a
comedic novel about the absurdities of Pakistani military life. I’ve read
several Lee Child novels this year while on the road, can’t remember the titles
to any of them, they were all pretty similar, great distractions from airport dead
time. Right now I am reading a novella by Joseph Conrad set in The Philippines
called Freya of the Seven Isles.
Who do you read and enjoy?
For style, Raymond Chandler,
Graham Greene, George Orwell, Joseph Conrad, Henry Miller, Peter Matthiessen,
Kurt Vonnegut, and Andy Rausch.
For plot, Katherine Dunn, Graham
Greene, Joseph Conrad, Elka Ray, Patricia Highsmith.
For message, David Goodis, Chester
Himes, Charles Bukowski, Katherine Dunn, Massimo Carlotto, Ross MacDonald,
Graham Greene, Peter Matthiessen, Thomas McGuane, Mikhail Bulgakov, Brian
Stoddart.
For being ‘out there’, Charles
Bukowski, William Burroughs, Hunter S Thompson, Jim Thompson, Michel
Houellebecq.
Is there any one book you wish you had written?
I guess I wish I had written or
will write a book like The Quiet American by Graham Greene – it knows its
location, tells a universal story and is prophetic at the same time. And it’s
bloody well written.
Favourite activity when not working or writing?
Travel to the four corners of the
world, swimming, walking, playing guitar, silence, cleaning the house (the
latter three largely for therapeutic reasons).
With your publishing hat on…..
Is it difficult juggling your time between the publishing
and your own writing?
Given that I am on the road a lot
and that my schedule can be hectic, my ability to focus on CWP is not regular
as clockwork, but it is consistent. I read a lot of manuscripts (mostly parts
thereof), answer mails, talk about design, submissions and promotions with my
partner Hans Kemp and about PR with our PR manager extraordinaire Chris Roy.
Crime Wave Press has been around for about six years now.
Are you still as busy as ever?
We have published 32 titles to
date. We publish in ebook and POD format and have noticed that despite our
authors getting more publicity than ever, that ebook sales are not increasing.
That is kind of frustrating. There are just too many books out there,
especially self-published ones that no one buys but that sort of clog up the
system. CWP was started to offer writers who were unlikely to be signed by the
big six publishing conglomerates a modest alternative to obscurity and
self-publishing.
We now publish an average of two
books a year. That way we can promote them to the best of our abilities while
still giving some attention to our signed authors.
What were your aims when you started the venture?
To publish great crime fiction on
a new platform. Turns out the new platform, as mentioned above, is problematic.
Amazon, which sells most of our books, is a monolithic greedy business empire
that abuses its workers and doesn’t pay enough tax. Ironically, we pay
inordinate amounts of tax in the US. It’s not a happy situation. But it is the
world we live in and the only practical way we can get our books to readers.
Do you feel satisfied that you have achieved those goals?
Given the aforementioned challenges,
the fact that we have published 32 really diverse novels feels pretty cool. We
have a happy and constructive relationship with many of our writers, readers
and reviewers, we attend literary festivals and the company pays for itself.
Any hints on what CWP has lined up for 2019?
A new and gritty novel by British
Noir writer Ben Jones in the spring. Currently juggling two titles and a bunch
of unread manuscripts for the fall release.
Do you anticipate CWP still being around in another five
or six years’ time?
Bloody hope so. Be great to
publish 50 crime fiction novels from around the world. As long as Hans is game
and we break even, the next thriller from Crime Wave Press is just a few months
away! Incidentally, we would like to publish more female authors. Submissions
guidelines on the website – www.crimewavepress.com
Thanks Col, for giving me the opportunity to answer a great, incisive set of questions.
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Many thanks to Tom for his time and Henry Roi for connecting us.
Tom Vater has written
non-fiction and fiction books, travel guides, documentary screenplays, and
countless feature articles investigating cultural and political trends and
oddities in Asia.
His stories have
appeared in publications such as The Asia Wall Street Journal, The Guardian,
The Times, Marie Claire, Penthouse and The Daily Telegraph.
He co-wrote The Most
Secret Place on Earth, a feature documentary on the CIA’s secret war in Laos
which has been broadcast in 25 countries. His bestselling book Sacred Skin (https://t.co/sMe3M6dUMp),
the first English language title on Thailand’s sacred tattoos, has received
more than 30 reviews.
His website: Tom Vater
Books: The Devil's Road to Kathmandu, The Cambodian Book of the Dead, The Man with the Golden Mind, The Monsoon Ghost Image
Crime Wave Press can be found here.
In addition to The Easter Make Believers, you have a couple of other books under your belt - Pancake Money and Dead Lemons, which I believe won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel. Please can you tell us a bit about each one? 
