Herman and the Serpent

One can really watch the news cycle acting like an ecosystem where one species feeds on another. Richard Neville and Julie Clarke published their book about Charles Sobhraj’s murders in the late 1970s. Recently, the book got yet another media adaptation as the television series The Serpent, and that TV series in turn has spurred newspapers and magazines this year to publish all these new articles about Sobhraj.

It must feel a bit odd to be an elderly participant in this drama who suddenly journalists want to interview again decades later and ask all the old questions, even though no new facts have really come to light, and that original Clarke & Neville book remains a perfectly adequate reference.