People often ask what inspired When the Darkness Swallowed the Sun. The honest answer is it’s been with me for decades.
I first went to Thailand in 1997 as a backpacker. I was young, curious, just coming out and completely open to the world. It felt like life in glorious Technicolor, a place of endless possibilities.
Years later, I returned as a foreign correspondent, spending five years living and working in Bangkok. During that time, I became aware of a number of deaths involving Western travellers – some tragic, some violent, most never fully explained.
Then came the murders of Hannah Witheridge and David Miller on Koh Tao in 2014. It was a case that stayed with me, not least because of how easily it could’ve been any one of us. Most return home with sunburn and stories, they didn’t return at all.
The question lingered: how can something so brutal happen in a place that seems like paradise?
Thailand’s a country of extraordinary beauty and generosity but living there revealed a more complex reality. It also attracts people that like to live in the shadows or those running away from past mistakes.
On my first day at a Bangkok newspaper, one of the editors – an ageing, whisky-soaked figure – asked me, in front of the whole newsroom, what “sexual predilection” had brought me to Thailand. That was my introduction. It didn’t get much better as among my colleagues were people with gunshot scars, others who’d lost fortunes gambling. At times, journalism there felt like a halfway house.
That atmosphere fed directly into my novel’s main protagonist Dan. He’s not a detective but a journalist – someone wrestling with his sexuality and other anxieties, who bets everything on solving a single, terrible crime in the hope of restoring some sense of purpose. Though he becomes embroiled with a magnetic Thai drifter, the young man’s easy charm hiding a predator’s gaze, which sees loyalties fracture and desires ignite, island dream descending into nightmare.
Because that’s what it can feel like: one moment everything’s golden and the next, something shifts. That’s what I wanted to capture in this novel – not only the crime itself but the fragile line between beauty and danger.
Robin Newbold is a journalist and author, with his latest thriller and Amazon Top 30 bestseller, When the Darkness Swallowed the Sun, out now! For more details see www.robinmnewbold.com
