meet jake NeedhaM
'Jake Needham
is probably the best known American writer almost no one
in America has
ever heard of.'
-- Hong Kong Magazine
Once upon a time, I was a screen and television writer, but then I started writing crime novels when I realized I really didn’t like movies and television all that much. Since then, I've published fifteen books, been nominated for the Barry Award three times, and the International Thriller Writer's Award once. The seventh book in my Inspector Tay series — WHO THE HELL IS HARRY BLACK? — won the Barry Award for Best Paperback Mystery of of 2024.
I may be an American novelist, but my books are better known outside the United States than they are in it. My novels have been popular best-sellers in Europe and Asia for nearly twenty-five years now, but none of them have ever been published in America or appeared on the shelves of a single American bookstore. Maybe that's what Hong Kong Magazine meant by the slightly painful observation above concerning whatever public distinction my books may have brought me.
My wife, our two sons, and I have divided our lives for many years between homes in the US and Bangkok, although now we're in Bangkok nearly all the time. The romantic notion of the American expatriate novelist living an exciting life in some exotic land pretty much disappeared nearly a century ago when Hemingway and Fitzgerald fled Paris, but there are still a few of us out there.
This is where we live...
And these are the people we live there with.
So what else would you like to know?
I was born in Texas, graduated from Rice University and the Georgetown University Law Center, and was subsequently admitted to the bar in Washington DC, New York, and Texas. I practiced international law dealing mostly with corporate mergers and acquisitions and eventually ended up living and working outside the United States for more than forty years.
A popular business magazine once said this about me: "Needham certainly knows where a few bodies are buried." Of course, I do. I'm the guy who buried them.
That's it.
At least, that's all I'm going to tell you.