Twilight Soi

Of all the thousands of stories he had written across his lifetime, author and journalist William John Stapleton had never been happier to write the words "The End" than when he completed The Twilight Soi series with the short book "Bangkok Busted: You Go To Jail For Sure". The series began in an anguished state after the author wrote a book detailing the decline of Bangkok's famous strip of go-go boy bars known as Soi Twilight, a narrow street adjacent to Bangkok's oldest red light district Patpong and telling the deeply personal, embarrassing and hurtful story of being ripped off by one of the streets better known denizens. Much had changed in the two years since he began the series. The writer finally got his pet project, A Sense of Place Publishing off the ground and finally settled in his current city of choice, Bangkok. But one thing that did not change was the vengeful pursuit of those who did not want to succeed. The book exposes routine robbery of tourists, issuing of death threats to those who did not voluntarily walk away after being stolen from and the tentacles of corruption that ran up and down from the colorful neon lit strip known as Soi Twilight.

With Thailand preparing for the ASEAN Summit of 2015, the welfare of visitors to the so-called Land of Smiles has become a major issue. Every day tourists are bashed, robbed, drugged and murdered; many of these incidents going unreported in the press. European, Australian, American and Chinese governments have all warned Thailand that the welfare of their citizens while on Thai soil has become an issue of major concern. Not For Publication is the final novella of The Twilight Soi series which relate how an unlikely but commonplace story of a foreigner being robbed and deceived in Thailand became a national and international incident. The works, which have their origins in the City of Black Eyed Angels aka Bangkok, use a sociological technique called participant observation to explore the corrupt liaisons between the city's go-go bars, the mafia, the police and government officials. As well, written in a style somewhere between reportage and memoir, the books tell a deeply personal but all too common a story of a foreign tourist getting into trouble in the heady but treacherous atmosphere of the so-called Land of Smiles.