Richard Neville - On the Trail of the Serpent: The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj (Revised and Updated)

RICHARD NEVILLE

Richard Neville was an Australian writer and commentator who first came to prominence as the editor of the counterculture magazine OZ. Having travelled the pot trail throughout the 1960s and 70s, Neville was commissioned by Random House to write the story of con man and serial killer Charles Sobhraj. The result, The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj, was a global bestseller. His books include Playpower, Hippie, Hippie, Shake, Out of My Mind and Amerika Psycho. Richard Neville died in September 2016.

JULIE CLARKE

Julie Clarke trained as a journalist on the Sydney Telegraph before joining ABC television. She later became a New York correspondent for Australian Consolidated Press and worked as a TV producer. Along with her partner Richard Neville she wrote The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj, an endeavour that took the pair all over the world for two years.

The authors and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce the photographs:

W. Heinecke;

W. Heinecke;

The Thai police

W. Heinecke;

W Heinecke;

Interpol

W Heinecke;

W. Heinecke;

Dominique Rennelleau

W. Heinecke;

The Thai police;

Kym Casper;

The Thai police

The Thai police

The Thai police;

The Indian police;

The Thai police

The Thai police

Eric Damour

W. Heinecke;

Nadine and Remy Gires

The Indian police;

Gus Photo

Gus Photo

Cover of Across Asia on the Cheap on reproduced by permission of Lonely Planet 1973.

More than forty years have passed since this book began for us. In 1977 Richard Neville and I were journalists living and working in New York City, I as a correspondent for an Australian media company and Richard as a well-connected freelancer.

Our relationship was in its early days. Wed rented a loft in Chinatown, tucked between two methadone maintenance clinics and a kung-fu studio, furnished with only a double bed and a ping-pong table. The loft was always perfumed with the scent of ducks, rubbed with anise and roasting on spits, wafting up from the restaurant beneath us.

Then came the call that ambitious young writers dream of. Random House was asking if Richard could leave immediately for Delhi. A notorious and charming young criminal named Charles Sobhraj had just been arrested in India. Of Vietnamese-Indian heritage, he had been raised in France and had impersonated many nationalities as a con man and poisoner in the five-star hotels and casinos of the world. Now he was implicated in a string of gruesome murders and druggings of tourists in Asia. It had been a highly publicized manhunt. Currently jailed in Delhi awaiting trial, the enterprising Sobhraj had sold his story to a Thailand-based American entrepreneur. Random House had purchased the rights. Richard was offered a contract to write his life story, quickly.

We were the opposite of hard-nosed news-hounds. Having made a name for himself as the publisher and editor of a frisky but radical underground magazine called OZ (today its literally a museum piece in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London), Richard was known as an articulate spokesperson for the counterculture. A natural maverick, with a dislike for authority that stemmed from being sent to boarding school too young, Richard loved to taunt the Establishment. He could talk his way into and out of any situation and was so funny and charming that some people became addicted to him. I suppose I was one of them.

In 1965, with his best friend, the psychedelic artist Martin Sharp, Richard had travelled from Sydney to London via a route that was only just opening up and was soon to become known as the pot trail, and later wrote of his experiences in his first book, Playpower.

By the early sixties, the young avant-garde had discovered that there was a big space on the map of the world between Australia and Europe: Asia. Nothing seemed to have changed there for hundreds of years, or since the British Raj. It was amazingly cheap, and thrillingly exotic, with cannabis and all sorts of drugs freely available. Time was different then too. Unlike the weekends away and city breaks of today, it was not uncommon, after finishing university and/or saving up for a year after high school, to take two or three years to float across the world, maybe doing some buying and selling along the way to keep the finances in shape.

From all quarters of the Earth students began flocking to Asia; it was the original magical mystery tour, like walking into history and geography books from other centuries on LSD, like trekking into the pages of National Geographic on ayahuasca. Unchanged cultures, the Himalayas, sensational cheap food, endless pristine beaches, $1-a-night hotels, crumbling Raj piles for $5 a night, and 50-cents-a-night guesthouses built of bamboo teetering beside green rivers. For shopaholics and budding traders there were exotic embroideries and costumes, gemstones and antiques, not to mention all sorts of drugs, sold for a fraction of the price in the West.

There were no guidebooks in 1965 when Richard left on that journey. In fact, he checked into a brothel (the Thai Son Kit) in Bangkok and stayed there for a week believing it was a hotel. Or so he claimed.

When I left on the same journey ten years later, the soon-to-be founders of Lonely Planet had printed a modest pamphlet called Across Asia On the Cheap.

I have a beautiful girlfriend whose mother, when she was seventeen, packed her suitcase for her across-Asia adventure; it contained ball gowns, Chanel type suits and kitten-heels. By the time she arrived at the other end, having, among many experiences, lived for three months with a family in Afghanistan, she had a Kalimantan basket containing antique sarongs, museum-quality lace blouses from India, and a heavily embroidered Afghani wedding dress. And not only had her wardrobe changed. She had taken LSD and had profound realizations that changed the course of her life in a good way, I believe.

Not all the stories were so happy. I heard of another girl from my university who was skinny-dipping in a river in Afghanistan and was shot dead by an outraged Pathan tribesman who had seen her from a hilltop.

My own journey began at the start of 1975 in Bali, which was then close to how one could imagine Heaven. On our first night in Kuta Beach, a tiny village without electricity and at the end of a muddy track, a local teenager sold us LSD, which inspired us to go body-surfing in the giant waves at the beach until dawn, enjoying the light show and sound effects of the violent thunderstorms. Quite unaware of our good fortune in having survived, we then ordered magic mushroom omelettes at Poppies caf. And so our aptly named pot trail journey began.