Jake Needham: The Serious Writer
The Singapore Strait Times describes him as “Asia’s most stylish and atmospheric writer of crime fiction”; The Edge (Singapore) says his writing has “No clichés, no BS. Thrillers written with a wry sense of irony in the mean-streets, fast-car, tough-talk tradition of Elmore Leonard.”; He describes his own writing as “Really hard work. Not for readers, I hope, but for me.”
Hailing from Angleton County, Texas, 56-year-old Jake Needham is the author of four novels and twelve screenplays. Jake practiced law for more than twenty years, working in Washington and Hong Kong, as well as spending time as a journalist in America and abroad. For more than fifteen years now Jake has lived in Thailand with his wife, herself a columnist for the Bangkok Post.
The first thing Jake points out is that nobody really calls him Jake: “Actually, my full name is Jake Raymond Needham but my friends and family generally call me Raymond or Ray. I stopped putting my middle name on books and screenplays when I discovered about fifteen years ago that screenwriters who used three names on their scripts were invariably assholes.” Forever sharp and real with his words, you could never accuse Jake of biting his tongue.
In 1999 Jake shot to fame with the release of his debut novel The Big Mango, a book that appears to have been the result of boredom: “I didn’t set out to achieve anything with it,” he says. “I had just written an original screenplay and done revisions for three other screenplays, and six straight months of movies was driving me around the bend. So I told my wife I thought I might see if I could write a novel. It was either that or take up golf.”
Jake donated all the profits from The Big Mango to an orphanage that he and his wife had been supporting. Jake’s time in Thailand is often reflected in his novels. The Laundry Man was a fast-paced thriller set against the shady backdrop of life in Thailand and Southeast Asia.
“I live here part of the year for family reasons,” says Jake, “and therefore Thailand sometimes ends up in my books and screenplays. That’s really about all there is to it. To tell the truth, I’m not all that fond of Bangkok. I just happen to be here sometimes. I imagine that guys who live and write books set in, say, Minneapolis must feel much the same way that I do with regard to their personal geography.”
Openly admitting that he never intended to become a write (“It just happened”), Jake recalls how in the late 1980s he stumbled upon running a modest television production company in Los Angeles. From there he backed into screenwriting and after writing a number of screenplays he sat down and started writing novels. “None of this was the result of any coherent plan,” he says.
Jake is quick to debunk the myth that the life of the author is all glitz and glamour. He paints a rather morbid image of his time sat at is computer: “Writing is not fun,” he explains. “It is brutally hard manual labor. As John Gregory Donne put it, it is laying pipe. You stick your butt in a chair one day after another, and you write about two thousand words on every single flipping one of them. At the end of sixty days, you have the first draft of a novel. Then you do exactly the same thing all over again and in another sixty days you have the second draft of a novel. You spend a third sixty days polishing that draft and then it might finally be ready to show to somebody and find out if it is any good at all. That adds up to six months of painful, solitary, isolated work without even knowing whether, at the end of it all, if you will have anything to show for it.”
Jake explains a little about what makes a good writer: “Every real writer,” he says, “has the same strong point: The discipline to produce regular, reliable work, day after day. We all have different weak points. Me, I can’t write sex. Wouldn’t even want to try. Can you imagine living in Bangkok and not being able to write sex? Blows the mind, so to speak, doesn’t it?”
You might think that good writing is the result of inspiration, but Jake points out that, for him at least, this couldn’t be further from the truth: “Inspiration is a word that makes me uneasy,” he says. Perhaps two decades in law have helped shaped his meticulous approach to work. “I don’t see good writing as coming from inspiration,” he continues. “It comes from unwavering discipline and very hard work. That might not sound particularly romantic, but there you are.”
Though it’s not an easy life, Jake’s years of hard work have paid off. The Big Mango, Jake’s biggest selling book to date, has been bought by Hollywood studios and is in the process of development. “I was in New York for most of October last year working on the screenplay for The Big Mango. Jim Gandolfini owns the rights and hired me to adapt the book into a film, but since he was doing the last season of ‘The Sopranos’ we had to wait for him for shooting. Revisions to the screenplay for The Big Mango kept me busy until January, but right behind that I was under contract to do rewrites on two other screenplays for which I wasn’t the original author. Rewrite jobs pay embarrassingly large amounts of money, but frankly they are seldom a whole lot of fun.” Jake does, however, admit that the film version of The Big Mango is still very much in the distant horizon.
On the subject of books, Jake is decidedly vague about whose he enjoys to read: “I have enjoyed so many different books over the years,” he explains. “There are a very long list of guys I like to read, although I don’t have any particular reason to look up to any of them in either a personal or even professional sense, and the first one to come to mind today would probably be the last one to come to mind tomorrow. How about, oh, let’s say Ross Thomas, one of America’s most undeservedly forgotten writers of popular crime fiction.”
With over 65,000 copies of his books in circulation, Jake Raymond Needham has become something of a household name, with his novels being printed in four languages and primarily distributed in non-English speaking countries. Interestingly, Jake continues to hold his stance of not allowing his books to be published in North America or Europe. This comes from his personal website: “I am continuing my long time policy of not allowing the marketing and distribution of any of my books in either North America or Europe. The resources required to do that effectively are far greater than those available to my publisher or, for that matter, to any other publisher in Asia. It comes down to this: I would rather my books were not distributed at all outside of Asia than watch them labor for attention against the promotional might the international publishing giants wield in their own home markets.”
For more information on Jake Needham and his novels, visit www.jakeneedham.com.
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