Monday, 1 April 2013
Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat. (George W Bush 17/9/2004)
There are times when an author’s real life experiences sort of get themselves caught up in the fictional creations, and you’d have to suspect there’s a fair bit of Mr and Mrs Cotterill’s experience tied up in the author’s new series starring ex-ace crime reporter Jimm Juree.
Cotterill had visited Chiang Mai in 1976 on his way to penal exile in Australia and vowed to return. Unfortunately, along the way Lonely Planet gave the place a glowing review and when Cotterill returned a decade later it was already on its way to tourist hell. An academic appointment at Chiang Mai University brought him back to the city in 2000, an email from a teacher asking me some inane grammar question led to Cotterill meeting and marrying a local lady (like Jimm, in her mid thirties) and the pair, eager to leave the polluted city and move to the country ended up in the locale the new series is set in.
Cotterill claims to be suited for the country life but his wife, like his new protagonist, wasn’t, having few outlets for her abilities and little in common with the locals so one’s inclined to suspect there’s a bit of the missus, the neighbours and assorted local identities, all modified to suit the plot lines of the stories in the cast of characters in the Jimm Juree series. He goes to some length (here) to stress that apart from minor details like their ages and where they were born there are no actual similarities between the missus and Jimm, who seems to be based on an amalgam of four female reporters he took to dinner while putting Jimm together, observed and then imagined how any of them would have coped with being wrenched away from the career she loved and forced to look after a mother who’s on the precipice overlooking dementia, a bodybuilding cowardly young brother, a retired traffic cop grandfather and a dilapidated short-time beach motel.
Effectively forced to relocate to a remote village on the coast of Southern Thailand when her mother, perhaps suffering from early dementia, unexpectedly sells the family home and associated convenience store next to the university in Chaing Mai and invests in a resort hotel in the rural south Jimm Juree had been an ambitious 34 year old divorced crime reporter for the Chiang Mai Daily Mail one small kidney failure away from the chief crime reporter's desk.
Left behind to effectively become Jimm’s link to the outside world is her transgendered sister Sissi (formerly older brother Somkiet) a lady boy who found fame as a beauty queen, eloped with a suitor who paid for the operation. The marriage didn’t last, Sissie returned to her family, and ended up a first-class computer hacker, the George Soros of dodgy Internet business. Unsurprisingly, Sissi is staying behind in Chiang Mai, running various internet businesses, and since she’s only a phone call away her skills will be invaluable as Jimm chases news stories.
As it turns out, the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant (there’s also a convenience store) sits on an untidy beach at Maprao in Chumphon province across the Gulf of Thailand from Vietnam. It’s not the sort of place that’s likely to attract hordes of paying customers and Jimm hates the constant smell of drying squid and the thud of coconuts falling from trees in search of a head (a falling coconut, of course, makes no sound prior to impact). There’s nothing to do after dark, it’s too close to nature and wildlife for a city girl, the shallow sea is so warm it breeds Jurassic life forms and there is, as far as Jimm can see, no crime.
Jimm draws the short straw, being landed with the cooking duties and walking the dogs her mother adopts, while her mother, who may or may not (you start to doubt these things reading between the lines) be drifting in and out of dementia, looks after the barely stocked resort shop, while her painfully shy body-building brother Arny manages the resort’s five (generally vacant cabins) and her monosyllabic, grandfather Jah, a retired policeman coming off forty years directing traffic watches the cars go by.