Jailhouse Schlock

Is it possible for a foreign male to visit Thailand without getting a) waylaid in a girlie bar, or b) arrested? This question struck me recently in Phuket, where the best-selling titles at the airport bookshop included a self-published novel about a murdered Thai prostitute, an exposé of the country’s sex industry and two memoirs by foreigners who had served time in Thai jails — a genre already as overcrowded as the prisons themselves. That Singapore publisher Monsoon Books feels there is room for one more — Nightmare in Bangkok by Andy Botts — begs two more questions. Why do so many foreigners get into trouble in Thailand? And why do so many tourists seem to enjoy reading about it?

Answering the first is easy: there’s a lot of trouble to get into. With Thailand bordering the opium-rich Golden Triangle, there will always be men like Botts who are fooled by the country’s freewheeling reputation and corrupt police force into thinking that smuggling out heroin in cans of shaving foam is a sensible way to earn a living. The second question is tougher. But apart from Alex Garland’s classic novel The Beach, the books I see most tourists reading in Thailand are the his-and-hers prison memoirs The Damage Done (convicted Australian heroin trafficker Warren Fellows’ account of life in Bang Kwang Central Prison) and Forget You Had A Daughter (by British smuggler Sandra Gregory). Wherever you go in the country, you find foreigners sipping cocktails on beautiful white-sand beaches and reading about how horrible the place is.

Compared to its rivals, Nightmare in Bangkok is, to lift a phrase from the classic backpacker T shirt, “same same but different.” In Thailand, Botts gets jailed for heroin smuggling, but not before being incarcerated in his native Hawaii, several times, for stealing things from cars. “You could write a book on this,” says a police officer, studying his lengthy rap sheet. “Please don’t,” is the reader’s quietly muttered invocation — but Botts does.

He makes a fair job of conveying the sheer tedium of prison life, in the sense that reading his book feels like a jail sentence. After describing the already well-documented horrors of Klong Prem Central Prison (rats, roaches, squat toilets), Botts spends his time smoking heroin and giving his fellow convicts amusing nicknames. “The Brit looked like a gravedigger with his wide stained teeth and sinister smile,” he writes. “We named him the Gravedigger.”

According to a front-cover quote from David McMillan, the author of Escape — another Klong Prem memoir, released in 2007 by the same publisher — Botts “opens his real-life experiences like a knife opening a cadaver.” In fact, Botts’ account is unharrowing. His description of a prison shack in what he calls “the garden,” a flyblown island of mud and compacted human waste where the cons passed their days, reminded me of a scuzzy bungalow I once stayed in on Koh Samui.

The problem with Nightmare in Bangkok, and books like it, is that it is hard to sympathize with the narrator. Botts, who is eventually transferred to a U.S. prison and granted parole after spending less than five years at Klong Prem, is not a lovable rogue but a thief and heroin trafficker, and his time behind bars prompts little self-reflection. Seeming to sense this, he closes the book with a lame attempt to recast his dismal life as a parable about overcoming addiction, with the suggestion that he should never have been jailed. I agree with him that criminalizing drug addiction is wrong. But jailing drug traffickers like Botts is still a very good idea. An even better idea: make the writing of their memoirs a parole violation.

Klong Prem’s reputation as one of the world’s most productive writer-in-residence programs looks set to flourish. One current inmate said to be writing his story is suspected arms dealer Viktor Bout. One that I hope will do the same is Harry Nicolaides, an Australian arrested for supposedly insulting Thailand’s crown prince in a self-published novel called Verisimilitude that sold only seven copies. Already famous for turning criminals into writers, is Thailand now turning writers into criminals? Now that’s worth writing a book about.