Corporate shenanigans kick start a writing career

Jake Needham has been a corporate lawyer for Alan Bond during what he describes as "the heyday of Australian cowboy capitalism", a frustrated HBO screenwriter on the receiving end of threatening e-mails from Tony Soprano and is now a successful novelist. His latest, The Umbrella Man, is a Samuel Tay novel and starts with explosions at three well-known hotels in Singapore. Based in Asia for more than 30 years, Needham likes to root his work in reality, but insists it's not just a fictionalised version of true events. After all, his novel-writing career started as a literary joke - his first work, The Big Mango, is a send-up of a genre he calls "the Bangkok bargirl and BS book". There are now three books in the Jack Shepherd series and two starring Singaporean cop Tay. met Needham in Macau, where he was researching his next book.

I was on Alan Bond's board during the frontier days of capitalism. Alan [who was eventually jailed, after Needham had left the company] was not shady. Entrepreneurs from Perth could do outrageous things because they didn't intersect with the real world. Nobody told them it was impossible … [but] after the 1987 financial panic, there was a kind of Cultural Revolution in Australia. The have-nots took down those they thought responsible and Alan went down. I was just his American lawyer. Through observing his life, I found out I was a novelist. I was fortunate to have stumbled into it.

Writing movies sounds glamorous and writers are paid obscene amounts of money, but it's never finished. You write a script and it gets rewritten and then the director rewrites it and then the actors come along and change it. That's OK - I've no patience with precious screenwriters because you still get paid. With writing a novel, when it's done it's done.

There is an inglorious tradition of expats in Bangkok discovering the bargirls and nightlife and having the notion they are a novelist. The Big Mango is a send-up of that bargirl and BS novel. I sent it to a friend at Asia Books who published it and it sold 40,000 copies in a couple of months. Then I started to work on a new character called Jack Shepherd and it has just grown from there.