Jake Needham: An Author in Asia and Beyond
By Tripti Chaudhary
From a lawyer to an author, Jake Needham has set his own place in Asia writing popular crime and espionage novels. Needham was born in the United States and graduated from Rice University and the Georgetown University Law Center. He practiced international law and then started writing for the American cable television.
However, soon after realizing he only liked to write for television, and wanted more passion to his work, he began writing novels instead. After living in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bangkok for the last 25 years, he based all his novels in Asia and has written five contemporary crime novels.
Needham’s books include the Jack Shepherd International Legal Thrillers series (A World of Trouble, Killing Plato, Laundry Man), the Inspector Samuel Tay Novels (The Umbrella Man, The Ambassador’s Wife), and The Big Mango.
An exclusive ThaiLawForum’s interview with Jake Needham disclosed his fanatical and passionate side for writing books. The interview gives us the chance to get to know lawyer turned author, Jake Needham better. He explains how he became a full time writer and what truly influences his writing. He claims to be dedicated to writing, as to finish a novel, it needs full dedication.
One of the most interesting statements out of this interview is when Needham is asked to explain why he chose to set the novels in Asia, and he replies with “I don’t really think I chose them, I think they sort off chose me.”
Needham looks at what’s in the air around him and bases the novels around the surrounding. He claims his most rewarding part of being an author is “When you sit there late at night, and you light a cigar. And you look up at your bookshelf. And there are four or five or six or a dozen books which you wrote. And you say to yourself, those are going to be there forever.”
Needham is presently working on a new set of books to expand on his list of novels and add to his writing career.
Jake Needham: An Author in Asia and Beyond
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