Q&A With Jake Needham

Jake Needham is a mystery thriller author, & screenwriter for television whom I’m so excited about doing this Q&A with! Some of Jake’s many works are The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels, the Jack Shepherd Novels & the international bestseller THE BIG MANGO & his new series The Charlie Trust Legal Thrillers with book 2 coming out on January 20^th titled Contempt of Court. 

Q: Jake welcome to Book Notions! I’m happy to be interviewing you! Would you please give a description of your series and standalone novels beginning with your recent series The Charlie Trust Legal Thrillers? 

A: My new series, the Charlie Trust Legal Thrillers, started last year with HABEAS CORPUS, which was book one. Book two, CONTEMPT OF COURT, came out just this month, and the plan now is to add two more titles to the series later this year. I’ve published sixteen novels over the past twenty-five years, and I had never published a book set in the United States until now, so I thought maybe I should give that a try before either my readers or I are too old to care. The Charlie Trust Legal Thrillers are all set in Los Angeles during the early 1990s. It was honestly a lot of fun to make the trip back thirty years into what a lot of people think was a far better time for LA, if only in my mind and imagination.

The sixteen novels I published before this series were in two different series with one standalone novel in there just for flavor. Probably my most popular series have been my Inspector Samuel Tay Novels, which is now up to nine books. Sam Tay is a homicide detective in Singapore, but he’s considered a bit of an oddball by his superiors in the Singapore police force, and maybe he is. Since Sam’s father was an American, he’s not seen by some as a sufficiently pure Singaporean in his heart, which leads to a certain amount of friction for Sam. Sam is an older guy who’s never married, and his bachelor persona has made him quite popular with female readers. I’m pleased about that, of course, although I must admit that I didn’t set out to achieve that. It just sort of happened, and it was as much a surprise to me as it probably was to Sam.

My other series is the Jack Shepherd novels. Shepherd is an American lawyer who walked out of his law firm in Washington D.C. on a bit of a whim to become a college professor at a Bangkok University. Shepherd is a renowned international expert in money laundering legislation, so naturally he’s drawn into investigating various criminal activity around Asia that involves large amounts of money. The six Shepherd novels play out against a background of expat life here in Thailand, as well as in Hong Kong and Dubai, and that’s really where the flavor of the series comes from.

My one standalone novel is called THE BIG MANGO, and the narrative concerns a huge amount of money that went missing from the bank of Vietnam when the North Vietnamese swept into Saigon in 1975. It’s a bit of a modern-day treasure hunt combined with a heist novel, and over the years it’s attracted an enormous amount of film and television interest. It’s never gotten made, of course, but those options and payments coming in regularly for over twenty years now have turned it into a nice little earner for me.

Q: What drew you into writing mystery thrillers and how long does it take you to write a book?

A: I was writing and producing television films back at the 90s for a living when it occurred to me, but I didn’t really like television very much, so I thought I would see if I could figure out how to write novels instead. I suppose it was natural enough that I would gravitate to writing mysteries and thrillers since that was pretty much what I read myself. I came to the process with no literary pretensions at all. I was in the entertainment business, not the literary business, so what I wanted to do was entertain people. And it would’ve been downright weird for me to try writing something I don’t read myself like science fiction or romance.

The length of time it has taken me between novels has varied a lot over the years. Sometimes I’ve had other responsibilities that absorbed time and kept me away from writing, and sometimes I haven’t. I used to produce a new title every couple of years, but then eventually I got that up to more like once every year. Now I’m happy to say that I’m up to producing maybe three books a year. Maybe I’m getting better at this, or maybe it’s just that I no longer have anything better to do.

Q: Do you prefer writing solo works more or a series and why? What lessons and themes do you hope readers take away after they finish writing the series?

A: The commercial reality is that marketing books in a series makes more sense for most writers these days than trying to market a group of unrelated titles. When you market a series, it means that a new reader coming through the door may read several titles, rather than just the one that attracted them to you in the first place. Getting new readers is hard, but keeping them reading our stuff is harder, and the competition is so fierce these days that writers need every commercial advantage we can get.

Q: Can you reveal what you are currently writing at the moment or is it too early to say?

A: I’m working on the two additional titles in the Charlie Trust series that I intend to have out this year, and that will take the series to four titles. Once they’re done, I’m going to give a little thought to adding another title to the Inspector Tay Novels. That series is up to nine titles now, so the idea of making even ten titles and giving Sam the sort of send-off he really deserves is very appealing.

Q: You are a screenwriter for television shows! Which shows have you written for and what is it like? Have you written screenplays for your books and does Hollywood have the rights to them? 

A: Back in the 90s, there was a substantial industry focused on producing original films for television. Cable television was just pushing its way into most people’s homes, and the broadcast industry was trying to figure out how to compete with it. Everybody’s solution to the problem was the same. It involved creating large amounts of original content to seduce viewers away from your competitor’s original content. It was a grand time to be in the film and television business. We had a lot of fun cranking out the tele-movies on tight schedules and even tighter budgets. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Q: What is it like living in Thailand? Where are your favorite places in Thailand that you recommend tourists visit when they decide to go? What other Asian countries have you seen?

A: We’ve lived here for well over thirty years now, so I forget how strange it seems to a lot of people to find an American writer living and working in Bangkok. I met my wife here in the very early 90s when she was the editor of a popular Thai magazine and I was shooting a movie which I had written here in Thailand for HBO. We’ve been married for thirty-two years now, and for most of that time we’ve maintained second residences in the US, but our primary home has always been here in Bangkok. And there’s not a day when I don’t feel damn lucky to be here.

Thailand isn’t really a country of tourist sites in the usual sense. We don’t have an Eiffel Tower that everybody lines up in front of to have their picture taken so they can upload it to Instagram. 

The experience that matters in Thailand is just being here. The Thai people are lovely human beings, and they infuse life with a spirit that many of us in the West have lost. 

My best advice to potential tourists is to plan your holiday around a lot of energy hanging out. Visit some temples, go to the beach, ride a couple of elephants if you must, but reserve most of your time for simply being here. That’s the part you’ll really remember.

And what other Asian countries have I seen?

(laughing)

All of them.