"Jake Needham is Michael Connelly with steamed rice.” -- The Bangkok Post
“Jake Needham is Asia’s most stylish and atmospheric writer of crime fiction.” – The Singapore Straits Times
"Jake Needham…has a knack for bringing intricate plots to life. His stories blur the line between fact and fiction and have a ripped-from-the-headlines feel. Buckle up and enjoy the ride." -- CNNgo
"Mr. Needham seems to know rather more than one ought about these things.” -- The Wall Street Journal Asia
How/why did you start to
write?
It was completely accidental. Honestly. For my sins, I had ended up running
a broken down little Hollywood production company that was making movies for
cable TV. I put together an outline to be distributed to the writers we were
working with that illustrated what I thought was the approach we ought to be
using in developing scripts. It was based around an idea for a movie that I
tossed off for the outline, not as a serious attempt to develop a story.
Regardless, somebody at the company didn't understand it that way and pitched it
to HBO as if it was a serious project. A couple of months later HBO called me
and offered to fund the development of my screenplay. I said, 'What screenplay?'
And they told me. At first I thought it was some kind of a joke, but then I
discovered it wasn't. And that was how I became a writer...
How did you become an
author?
I wrote THE BIG MANGO, which was my first novel, over six months in 1995
when I started getting sick of doing screenplays. I really had no clue what to
do with it, so I packed the manuscript off to a man who was then in the very top
tier of American literary agents and whose name I had simply plucked out of a
directory of agents. Not only did he like it and take me on as a client, but he
worked hard for three or four years to place that book with an American
publisher. Too mid-list, everyone said, not the stuff of a blockbuster. I think
they were right about that, but if that's the fundamental criteria for deciding
what books ought to be published, I think we're all ultimately screwed. Still,
Perry kept trying to find a home for THE BIG MANGO until the day he retired.
When he did, I took the manuscript and gave it to a small Asian publisher who
published a lot of English-language books and who was keen to see it out there..
THE BIG MANGO has since sold well over 100,000 copies in its print editions,
another 15,000 or so in a new e-book edition, and been optioned by film
producers over and over.
What was your first published
piece?
I'd been involved in the production of quite a few screenplays that passed
through my hands, but THE BIG MANGO was my first published book.
Where was it
published?
It was published by Asia Books in Bangkok.
How long ago?
1999
What did you do before
embarking on your writing career? Was it an asset to your writing?
How?
Although after I graduated from college I spent several years as a writer
and producer for NBC News, I decided pretty quickly that wasn't for me and
bundled myself off to law school. I was a lawyer and investment banker for a
decade or so before I fell into writing screenplays, working mostly with Asian
corporations, and I draw on the weirdness and adventure of those times for
nearly everything I write. When you work the borderlines of the Pacific Rim, you
deal with all sorts of characters -- ambassadors and criminals and hustlers and
spies -- and those are the characters who end up in the kinds of crime novels I
write now.
What inspires you?
The word 'inspiration' makes my skin crawl. Writing isn't inspiration. It's
discipline. John Gregory Dunne called writing 'manual labor of the mind' and
compared it to digging ditches and laying pipe. Inspiration, or the lack of it,
makes no damn difference. What does make a difference is finding within you the
discipline to do the work, day after day. You just keep digging and laying that
pipe no matter how much your body aches, one foot after another.
Please share one of your
successful marketing techniques
I'm not sure I have any. I try to write good books. I stay in touch with
readers who want to stay in touch with me -- mostly through Twitter and email,
since I find Facebook more annoying than anything else -- and those readers help
to spread word-of-mouth recommendations for me to new readers. Other than that,
I have no clue how to market a novel, and generally I don't think publishers do
either.
Parting words
I think we're in a golden age for both readers and writers. For the first
time, books are broadly accessible to everyone all the time regardless of where
they are. Publishers, distributors, and retailers have lost the power to dictate
the relationship between readers and writers. And we're all better off for
it.
