<p>The <i>Bangkok Post</i> <a href="http://www.bangkokpost.com/mail/34696/" target="_blank">reviewed The Garden of Evil today</a> and was very kind indeed (thank you). <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Trink" target="_blank">Bernard Trink</a> closes his piece...</p>
<blockquote>
  <p>There are many Italian crime fiction writers around, but none hold a candle to David Hewson.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Praise indeed. But I can't just pass on this pleasant news without telling you a little more about the legendary Bernard. Back in the early 1980s when I first visited Thailand as a journalist Bernard was writing his famous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Trink" target="_blank">Night Owl column</a> in the <i>Bangkok World</i>, a very individual diary of the more salacious side of the city's nightlife. No one wrote anything quite like <i>Night Owl</i> though many have tried. So famous did Bernard's nocturnal musing become that he even found himself profiled in <a href="http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/2000/1016/books.horn.html" target="_blank">Time magazine</a> on the occasion of an unauthorised biography called <i>I Don't Give A Hoot!</i>, his usual column payoff line.</p>
<!--more--><p>That biography noted of his columns, 'Each one [is] a snapshot of what was going on in the city that week, whether it was a flood, a military coup, an economic crisis or a shortage of Dinty Moore's beef stew.'</p>
<p>And that sums it up really. On the surface a cataloguing of the girlie bars, restaurants and perennial pitfalls for the <i>farang</i> of living in Bangkok, it actually turned into an occasionally surrealist snapshot of a remarkable city in a state of perpetual transformation.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>They don't, sadly, produce many newspaper columnists as individual and, on occasion, outrageous as Bernard Trink any more. You can find <a href="http://www.oocities.com/doxyblue/alltrink.html" target="_blank">a number of his articles on this fan site</a>. To get a touch of his personal style <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/19980122042819/www.bangkokpost.net/trink/trink980110.html" target="_blank">try this column</a>, where he offers a funny story about being 'given' a car -- he doesn't drive -- to illustrate what he calls the Thai version of persuasion and then offers a few paragraphs of local useful information such as, 'THE air-conditioned King's Love Boat Beer-Bar (ground floor of the Bat Boat, Patpong 2) is now in operation. Whether or not it catches on, only time will tell.'</p>The column moved to the <i>Bangkok Post</i> in the mid 1980s and was dropped by the paper a few years back, prompting a storm of protests from outraged readers. But it's good to see he's still writing for the paper. They don't make reporters like that any more. Thank you Bernard -- and for the review too.