Argylle - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Elly Conway is the author of the debut thriller Argylle , the inspiration for the upcoming film of the same name. She lives somewhere in the United States. Klappentext "Chronicles Aubrey Argylle's journey from hard-drinking, rough-around-the-edges everyman, living off the grid in the jungles of Thailand, to [a] debonaire secret agent"-- Leseprobe Four thousand miles from the moscow studio which is the scene of Vasily Federov’s television triumph, at the point where northern Thailand meets Myanmar and Laos in an area of South East Asia commonly known as the Golden Triangle, a figure swings languidly in a hammock on the wooden verandah of a bamboo hut on the outskirts of Chiang Saen. Aubrey Argylle is in his early twenties, all long limbs and broad shoulders, with clear eyes and a strong chin softened by a dimple, and dark, curly hair which he has tied back with a brown elastic band picked up that morning from the floor of the post office in town. The strands of hair that have escaped the band have ringleted with the heat. Yesterday the thermometer here passed one hundred degrees, and while today is a few degrees cooler the humidity is too high for the warm sweat to evaporate, so instead it forms a sticky coating on his skin. One of Argylle’s narrow bare feet is on the wooden floor, keeping the hammock in motion, but the rest of him is still. The notebook he was writing in just a few moments before rests face down on his stomach, the pen forgotten in his hand. He hasn’t long returned from leading a small tour group on a hike up to Wat Phra That Pha Ngao, a Buddhist temple on a hilltop a few kilometres out of town. The temple itself is nothing special, but it provides a breathtaking view across the Mekong River and the mountain jungles beyond, into Laos. ‘Is this it?’ the tourists had asked him, straining to see in the other direction towards the rugged hills of Myanmar, although they still call it Burma. ‘Are we in the Golden Triangle now?’ Argylle is used to managing the disappointment of tourists who have come here expecting to see mule trains laden with bricks of opium marching across distant mountain ridges. The opium trade that made the area notorious from the 1960s to the 1990s has now largely moved on to Afghanistan. There are still tribal gangs operating, particularly the warlords on the Myanmar side, and opium is still being funnelled from the poppy fields on the mountaintops down through Chiang Rai and Bangkok and then on to America and Hong Kong. But now the remaining traffickers tend to deal in methamphetamine, which is lucrative though it lacks the old-school glamour the tourists have come to find. Argylle could tell them there is nothing remotely glamorous about the drug trade. If you asked Argylle exactly how long he has been scratching a living here in this tropical backwater, he would give you a vague answer. ‘A couple of years,’ he might say, even though it has been more like five. He doesn’t want to face up to the fact he has hit a dead end. He knows why he came back here—in search of answers. But he has no idea why he has stayed. He drags himself to his feet and drains his now-warm beer. Entering the hut, which consists of wooden boards laid across a wooden frame, bamboo walls and roof and glassless windows open to the muggy air, he crosses to a wooden board resting on two empty oil cans that serves as a bookshelf for a row of well-thumbed paperbacks—some standard airport fare, traded among long-stay backpackers, others more surprising. Camus, Kafka, James Baldwin. At the far end is a stack of notebooks, on top of which Argylle places the one he was writing in earlier. Most of the notebooks are the cheap variety he buys in the town. Only the one at the very bottom is different, thick and leather-bound, with the tip of an integral satin bookmark ribbon just visible at the bottom. ...

Product details

• Authors: Elly Conway
• Publisher: Bantam Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 09.01.2024
• EAN: 9780593600016
• ISBN: 978-0-593-60001-6
• Dimensions: 163 mm x 244 mm x 33 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Suspense > Crime fiction, thrillers, espionage