MURDER IN BALI - A great plot but I can't do it as she'd sue me....

Last night I worked a party. That means I was hired to read palms/ stars / tarot for the guests. I know the hostess for thirty years, a  temperamental writer/ screenwriter/ novelist, journalist, a woman of a passionate disposition named Gwen.

Gwen was very sad when I got there. I asked why she was so moody though I suspected it was because no guests had shown up yet and she tends to lose faith.  "My agent told me I was a nobody!" She rightly read the surprise in my eyes and continued. "After 14 hit books, ya take one little vacation to be a journalist  for a prestigious newspaper and now my agent advised me not to write another novel under my own name! Ever! He made me think that I'm no longer ANYBODY in the book world. I have to publish my next book as some other person! NOT MY OWN NAME. And here's what's really awful. I had sent him my first chapter of my book about this crime solving woman's club and he hated it! "

I didn't say anything because the night before I'd been watching the new 'Woman's MURDER CLUB" a TV series on ABC where four women, two cops a forensic Morgue gal and a reporter solve murders! Kind of like the cutsie pie "ex Wives Club" only with stiffs. I didn't want to announce to my friend that the idea had been done yesterday! Because she now was weeping that she had children to support and was nearly out of money.

I was concerned. " So tell me? What's the plot? WHOSE murder is it in your book?"
"Glynis, she's an Irish woman"
"Ummmhmmm," I intoned."  remembering that my hostess Gwen, when travel editor for a MAJOR NEWSPAPER had lived in Ireland and thru a handsome male friend, become pro IRA.

Her guests were now arriving so I went to work and IN THE FORTUNE TELLER's secret DEN and spent the night reading palms. The room was dark with orange lights, but propped up beside my left hand was this BOOK on the AQUINOS and the IMPOSSIBLE DREAM the UNFINISHED REVOLUTION all about Aquino's murder at the hands of Philippine dissidents, and next to it, a photo of a handsome blonde man whom any girl would desire to know better.

At midnight, when I finished work, my hostess came in to thank me. "Who is this blonde guy?" I asked as I felt I was somehow aquainted with the beguiling blonde Aryan God Apollo who had been staring me in the face all night. "That's no guy!" she said. "It's a woman." After I picked myself up off the floor, I said, 'oh I guess I didn't have my glasses on.

"So, you're the Fortuneteller lady, --tell me about her."  I picked the photo up and squinted. Now I began to see, what an extraordinary woman 'this guy' would make as he/she was a broad shouldered, long armed, athletic type, like an Olympic skier. I amended my mental eyesight to see her as an Amazon  among women, with a flowing, rippling Dutch bob, strong, Apollo like masculine features, sunning herself in Bali on a beach with my chum Gwen by her side. The photo cut her just above the breasts so the big, bare shoulders did look mannish.

I began to describe her character, "invading man's terrain, political. smart."
"AND??" Gwen demanded?
"Uhhhh. She's the new 22nd century woman, a new breed."
"AND? Gwen demanded?
"Hey, That's all she wrote. I'm as psychic as a tampon!"
Gwen didn't laugh. "Well, SHE WAS MURDERED"
I goose fleshed. 'EEK"
"That was my closest girl friend while I was living in BALI, Indonesia--a New York Times reporter  and she lived there too and well, it seems she may have been murdered ---I mean she was, but maybe by her boyfriend! I'm not sure, but maybe he may have beat her up! and if he did, well he got off all charges. The official story from Muslim government of Indonesia is that she slipped and FELL." Her eyes were bright with fury, her cheeks red. I could see that passion she had which she'd poured into so many of her novels but it was deflecting her from the bigger story.   I'd been reading palms all night next to some kind of altar dedicated to the murdered friend of my grieving hostess, a woman who'd been an important top New Mag in USA expose journalist. The book "IMPOSSIBLE DREAM Unfinished Revolution", its subject Benigno and Corazon Aquino" who fought MUSLIMS tooth and nail in  the Philippines where to this day, there's a huge terrorist community.

"She  was on the plane the day they shot Aquino. She witnessed it. She wrote it up. She didn't die of a fall as the newspapers reported. She was beat to death, murdered by this bad ass boyfriend, her lover. He paid for a cover-up or something."

I drove the lonely road back to the Valley at midnight. (no tags, no license, no insurance, like a little terrorist evading cop cars.) Only I can't sleep. I'm just riveted with the story and her pain at having her own agent reject her work. But Glynis? THE IRA? Just not millennium enough, a tad 60's. She's writing a mystery which I told her to do a week ago, and when I said it, she said she already WAS. Smart move. The most commercial form, but for my money, if its' about IRELAND it's the WRONG ONE.. If you pretended to yourself that the film was already done and was a huge hit, one which had intellectuals in transfixes of worship, it would have to be like the KILLING FIELDS, the NY TIMES reporter's book on Cambodia. Or the Patricia Arquette film about Burma. It was not about two girls in Bali, one who gets killed by her sweetie. It was about a famous reporter coming up against a Muslim killer regime that regularly genocided Hindus and Buddhists living in Indonesia. BALI is inside INDONESIA. Bali IS OWNED by INDONESIA, and the owners don't respect the possession much.OR LIVES. They killed a million of their own people with CIA HELP.

So Miss Marple here, Miss nosy bones, gets all insistent. I write up my ideas and send them to her in an email. "I love mysteries, you know I dated a two time Oscar winning screenwriter for thirty years, (also a major two timer!) who wrote thrillers and suspense and murder plots and I went to all his classes on writing for those years. In fact, ever since, in homage to him, I collect tips on HOW TO WRITE  and put ads at CRAIGS LIST in TALENT SECTION in every city of USA saying 'Want to be in SHOW BIZ? Learn the safe way without spending money on schools drama coaches, etc," and the HOLLYWOOD BOUND website addie. And all the information I ever got from the writer boyfriend and from every book I ever read on the subject of making it big as a writer - producer.

"What you've got in your own life, the grieving over the woman murdered in Bali....is even more commercial than the IRA/ IRISH story. It's a combo mystery and THRILLER.. YOUR "WOMAN's MURDER CLUB" idea being trampled by agent is a blessing in disguise. Your agent is right. Why make your new book, your return to the world of best sellers about Glynis in IRELAND? Muslims are what's happening today. ISLAM is after the West! MAKE your book about INDONESIA and the MURDEROUS MUSLIMS who killed her."

You who are reading this article look up PILGER the massively brilliant researcher & journalist who is the expert: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jan/28/indonesia.world

So my email goes on:  "I know you lived in Belfast and Dublin and saw the IRA for years, up close through the man you were in love with in Ireland, back in the 90's but HECK, you also covered BALI for the BIG NEWSPAPERs during The Jakarta genocide, the tsunami, the Bali beach bombing. You knew about the MUSLIM GOV there, how muslim terrorism is safe there, how it's a hotbed, how Islam bombed 87 kids in a beach nightclub, how they genocided their hindus and buddhists in the city? How the jerks won't let the Tsunami orphans come to the west, not one! (I'd run a TSUNAMI ORPHAN WEBSITE for a year to create a coalition to get the kids out of all Muslim countries to the west. an UTTER FAILURE!! Even Jerry Falwell was rejected when he wanted to build a huge million dollar orphanage, there in Indonesia to care for them!!) These MUSLIMS are hateful spiteful, fanatic West-hating losers. Make the plot about Indonesia which CONTAINS BALI the way the USA contains California....as it's about the biggest battle of our day: MUSLIMS against the WEST, which is a now subject, hotter than coals!

Write about the bucolic place where you love to vacation, which unfortunately is owned by the worst despots this side of MYANMAR, where you met the real life murdered girl. And make it not about falling down stairs, but about her murder! Your agent didn't like the Woman's club aspect of crime solving, well maybe it is too kitsch like the Cutie pie "Ex Wives Club" series of books. So who needs to go cute?

YOUR STORY is really the expose REPORTER, a liberal western amazon woman in Muslim Indonesia? Probably writing her next book about the Muslim military in Jakarta?  Being spied on by them? HAVE your heroine stumble on something bigger, beyond this one death, & solve the crime. Like in PELICAN BRIEF where  JULIA whosis with the smile unravels a huge conspiracy! The best mystery heroes are a detective who is an obsessed solo act, they are beagles, infuriated with the murder. Who takes it personally like JULIA does when they kill her lover in first scenes of PELICAN and ends up downing the president himself.

SPIN a few of these little plot threads I wanna give you into your murder. Stop working on Glynis in Ireland. Put this thru YOUR imagination and imagine yourself in your most glorious,  JOAN OF ARC armor, as maybe a Peace Corps volunteer, working post tsunami for thousands of orphaned kids, and a few adults who survived, and you're working not in BALI where tourism is #1 industry but maybe on INDONESIAN BEACHES that got tsunamied. There is grinding poverty, death bodies, just a horrific chaos.

And make the HEROINE part of some liberal group, maybe the EMBASSY or maybe Section 20, the part of peace corps that develops artisanry....but others in your village are the other sections, bridge building, road building, etc. schools, and they all have to deal with the suppressive horrid indonesian Muslim government totally adoring the palistinian'cause' and hating usa, etc.so it's Gwen, her taste, but you're young, beautiful, thirty, connected with this charitable usa group. You're working in a hostile INDONESIAN climate, the people who won't let any orphans at all out to paris/ london/ bev hills. not a one. they'd rather keep them in shacks on the beach where their parents died...than let them be adopted into the west.

So imagine in this horror climate, your authoress gets murdered. a political woman, an amazing amazon, and hey, it could have been a hit, it could have been the Muslim military, maybe if you had this woman do a book on THE BURMESE MILITARY .or even indonesian Muslims and they somehow catch wind of the interviews she's doing.  Let these threads be caught up in the weaving you're doing. cause hey you know that in one year you'll be on the book p.r. circuit talking about the real girl. So she's not lost. The possiblity that it was just a scumbag guy.....that still can be told and it'll make folks race to buy the book, you got best seller written on it when it'sa political suspense thriller mystry. FOUR THINGS that are hotter than platinum

So that when you are talking about your book, on TV/radio, it is about a crazy country, tilted, the ethereal balineese at one end, the muslims with their crazy thanatos embracing death culture weighing down the other end.... and there's a real life 22nd century woman at the center of it and that will make everyone go out and buy the book! It's Grisham, Forsyth, Daniel Silva but with Super chick.

I am truly enamored of political thrillers that had women at the center like the PELICAN BRIEF (Grisham) or THE CLIENT, GRISHAM. Adore Daniel Silva's works (Mossad undercover agent is his hero) and the king of political thrillers is Frederic Forsyth... I am addicted to reading them. Odessa File one of FF's best. ALL of silva's works are great. This genre thrives on testosterone, not estrogen!

I continually make notes on the points of structure that these guys observe. in My "HOW TO WRITE A THRILLER and HOW TO WRITE A MYSTERY. There is always the searcher, the angry searcher the furious obsessed searcher. There is always the villainy and the villain, the horror of whoever did the crime, in this case the bf who murdered her with his hands, with blunt objects or maybe it's that he was an operative who had penetrated her world, she's a big authoress, they frequently send gorgeous specimens to snoop. Mossad does it all the time, Then how this guy just disappeared, who supported him? SAUDI THRONE FUNDS TERRORISTS IN INDONESIA to this day. SO make the KILLER a Muslim military boy spy!

You don't have to stick literally to her story as you knew it --as this case has some plot dead ends built into it unless he's gone on to the next amazon woman. and new woman has no idea of his history, maybe that's a potential path. Gwen i.e. your character, becomes the watcher-over on the new girl maybe? the angelic guardian of a girl who will not listen to reason on him? I mean there are at least a dozen plot roads that your angry, obsessed, grieving watcher woman can take.

I think I'd prefer for it to be part of a bigger Muslim conspiracy against the dead writer. For instance, her next book was to be on the WHITE RAJAS who took over part of MALAYSIA for a century, exploiting the Muslims. Maybe they figured that she would rewrite history, be a revisionist.  (More on the dead writer girl's next project below, here at end.)

So, galpal, make it about BALI. Do it in the steely maculine non kitsch non cute style of the great ones, Silva, Forsyth, Grisham. No cutsie girls club at all. oh sure our heroine is a woman but like the admired dead woman, has in her heart this FURY to take on the killers of this planet. Only our heroine wants to find the guilty party, make the man pay, or maybe she stumbles on a deeper, darker secret....and finds the people who did this, (maybe notes hidden under the old typewriter...no one steals that as the PC looks ilke it has the hard drive, or maybe the authoress backed upon floppies, gave them to the other character, Gwen...

The fleeing BF could be over the border in Burma where a huge regime of drug exporting military exists, one started by the OSS/ CIA.. Then you take on the biggest worstest group of shitheels, the drug trading Myanmar which had its roots in colonel paul hellwell's (HELLIWELL) CIA OSS group that used its heroin to sell in the US ghettos (jail all the blacks after we addict them).... OR keep it local the INDONESIA MUSLIM MILITARY. Who needs mynmar/burma? take on the F'in crap, genocidal muslims who have gone through bali killing buddhists on killing sprees, taking down whole neighbrprhoods in the past. maybe even that bombing somehow came from their own muslim CIA.

Anyway you have enuf polit stuff to stuff a pinata in this brilliant pair of women living in balinese buddhist community never realizing that the muslims knew what the fated-to-die authoress was doing. These evil men run indonesia and it is a mlitary gov and her new book,(maybe) was on something related to the oft repeated genocide of the balinese buddhists. Cuz if you do the evil boyfriend thing, youre back in Judith Rossner's 1970 "MR GOODBAR" territory and while your gal could go after him, what is she uncovering?

Where is the onion she's peeling? just a guy who loses his temper? That's like a one story cottage. this is fiction. You can do anything, much bigger. A skyscraper implicating regimes. Go back to publishing with a sharp edged political thriller you go back under your real name.

Have our HEROINE stumble on clues. THE OFFICIAL STORY that it was a fall down stairs where she broke nose, jaw, skull, etc. Maybe the plot thickens this way: The heroine hears from the MAID  that the bad boyfriend wasn't what he pretended to be. Then she puts that together with something she finds in the tiny little vintage smith corona in its case, has floppies under the typewriter. the book the dead woman was actually writing...was it another Yankee Hard sell, a Cory Aquino and a western facing democracy coming to a semi muslim place like the Philippines? or was it the actual Muslim military of Indonesia and their genocide of Hindu/Buddhist Balinese?

Then have your heroine stumbles on the maidservant who had observed the boyfriend over a six mos. period and who has some amazing comments. like: he wasn't balinese, his accent, his demeanor, we'd read it as muslim. WHAT? bali boy playing a role? foisting himself on a very political, liberation theory gringa authoress as a BALI BOY? and he wasn't?  She goes on to the next witness, to the priest, or to the university professor, The MILITARY catches wind of her search. She's followed. Danger, alarm. WHAT IS THIS Peace CORP GIRL DOING WITH THE balineese UNIVERSITY LIBERAL? taping/ NOTES? breakins. American embassy. More witnesses. The fanatic, terrorist muslim mind vs western democracy panorama unfolds.

This is the drama folks ought to read about cuz THE WORLD has taken sides. Armageddon is the enemy, as you pointed out, it's all funneling down to this one little battle, MUSLIM versus western man/ christianity and judaism.

You're writing something that is on the PULSE POINT of this war. Yet imagine the exquisite victim here, the BALINESE PEOPLE trapped in a MUSLIM INDONESIA.

Gwen, ponder your research trip that you'd have to make. You have frequent flyer miles and you know you want to go! You'd have to go back and find out about this rift between the BALINESE and their own GOV, the INDONESIAN MUSLIMS. Envision the DELICIOUSNESS beyond John Huston shooting all over Africa, (bogart) asia (kipling) and all over mexico...tennessee williams, and sierra madre. Imagine you in the the beauty of bali as backdrop to a PELICAN BRIEF SUSPENSE THRILLER! " I WROTE THAT TO HER. I wanted her to switch plots mid stream.

"Imagine how you'd have to shoot exteriors in secret, as military is mega suppressive. Imagine the rippling scandal and fame of your book being so immense that second unit work would have to be done first and you'd shoot rest in thailand. cuz military would not let your film crew IN to BALI! Bali's unique (I noted that you have the Miguel Covarrubias book on BALI, --i ordered an antique version of it, original i'd hoped, printed mid forties or late forties copy from a dealer three months ago, only l9$ my son got it in mail and it's lost at his house in hawaii and he's using it to beat me over the head for criticizing his diet of coke and bigmacs, and I'm telling him he lost BALI cuz of his diet)  But your setting/ millieu is so mindbogglingly UNIQUE that you would have to shoot exteriors in Bali. architecture art, people. their holiness, the villages of peasants -- maybe where the dead woman's maid lives

So heroine goes on a horrified search, uncovering onion skin after skin wi. witnesses, who testify, implicate. For a book to stimulate the readers' rage, hatred, grief at loss, then unfolding horror as the truth outs, then the suspense as the dragon catches sight of the searcher.....wow, this is a great novel. Set in muslim indonesia is just as riveting to Americans now as Sherman invading Atlanta and Scarlett present at its burning was when Margaret Mitchell did GWTW. That's what the writer calls the "SET PIECE" if I remember my Edward Anhalt 101. (I went to hundreds of his film writing classes at S.C. Loyola, Sherwood Oaks, typed his scripts for thirty years.....The set piece here would be the big chaos scene where the Indonesian soldiers rip through the HINDU barrio of their capital city JAKARTA killing everyone in the streets. Think of the horror, rage & religious fanatacism fueling that genocide and the religious rift in INDONESIA that mimics the one between the West and Islam everywhere else, today. Research the genoicide in bali! Only buddhists and HINDUS.

You told me you have frequent flyer miles. Well, go back to Bali quietly and be focused and fer goodness sake, don't let the military catch you phoning up radicals at univ. and etc. etc. do your homework first, work very carefully to not have phone calls monitored which radical all have there....actual bugs, work with just letters maybe. The old way, until you get there to make your appts at the appointed hour, still no phone calls. Researching in books you'll find local experts. Take a sample of your own, personal video film of bali's beauty to show the producers who nibble at your book sale to film, faces, architecture, art, plants. people talking. that's it, your witnesses walking you through villages talking about the recent genocide. shoot it yourself. Gwen the tourist with a good video set up.

But remember, if she was working on another book, after doing the aquinos, who faced west, in a country where muslims are multiplying like mold, she was already seated without knowing it, on the site of Armageddon. That rock, that rift in Israel that divides ISLAM and its Muslims and Israel & the West.

Gwen WROTE ME BACK:  "Thanks but please don't help me write. Please also if/when you come again, don't feed my dog sushi.  She is very delicate and her stomach is easily messed up. And Bali is Hindu." Slam! End of email.

I winced. She didn't like any of the story ideas? OK. Then I"ll publish the idea to my writers' list as I don't have enough lifetime left in me to do the research or writing of the idea. Screen this INDONESIA MOVIE WITH MEL GIBSON and see if you're inspired to take on her murder. Details etc BELOW. I can't make a time commitment. Novels take a year.  SCRIPTS are real fast, 4 1/2 days if you've done some outline cards, scene by scene. NOVELS? A YEAR! So I then write the whole genesis of idea up, I stick it on my  three webpages as this article you're reading now.

  #1 is CLASSES for HOLLYWOOD BOUND WRITERS and #2 is the FILM INDEX, and # 3 is  IDEAS FOR WRITERS hundreds of inspirational articles there, many not on writing but on acting, breaking in, producing, directing, making auteur films, finding funding. Doing video movies, too.

And I stand up in front of the PC to get ready to go out and buy catfood. But before I leave for the market I sent the BALI MURDER IDEA FOR A SCRIPT OR BOOK to my writers' list, a few kids who've answered me in past yrs when I publish a new web article on screenwriting and post that fact on CRAIGS LIST in TALENT AREA in an AD, "THE SANE WAY TO GET TO HOLLYWOOD.". I collected their names, made an email list. So I send it out, I guess forgetting that Gwen is on the writer's list. I get this from her: "You are fucking insane.  You are going to get me sued or killed.  I am so sorry I ever let you back in my life."

OOPS! I told you she was temperamental! Well, not seeing her viewpoint quite yet, UNDAUNTED by my friend's rejection of me and my ideas, (she called me a diaharrea mouth, vomitorium,) I thought, I'm out of it. I'll just let her write up Glynis the IRA and the cute-sie Woman's Murder Club.

I am ready to hit the road for catfood. Keys in hand but, I found myself continuing to think about  the murder of this poor woman as an expose of INDONESIA. I sat down again and STARTED GOOGLING and found this:

-----------------------
NAME EXCISED - Veteran journalist for Time magazine and one of the first women to become a correspondent for the weekly, who was the southeast Asia bureau chief who had just interviewed Philippine opposition leader Benigno Aquino moments before he was assassinated in 1983, and who later wrote the book "Impossible
Dream: The Marcoses, the Aquinos, and the Unfinished Revolution" about her experiences, died Feb. 27 while vacationing in Denpassar, Bali after an apparent accidental fall.

Another entry: "one of the first women to become a correspondent for Time Magazine, died on Feb. 27. Cause of death was not released. She graduated from Middlebury College and joined Time as a library "clip girl" in 1964. During the 1970s, she rose through the magazine's ranks, working as a correspondent in Los Angeles and Paris and as the Boston bureau chief. She became the Hong Kong bureau chief in 1982, and made a name for herself covering southeast Asia.

In 1983, she was flying with opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino as he
returned to the Philippines from exile in the United States. Once the plane
landed, Aquino was escorted to the tarmac by government soldiers and
executed. She later testified against the soldiers accused of the
assassination and provided her audio tape recording of the shooting.

Aquino's murder sparked unrest and eventually led to the 1986 revolt that
toppled dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, and installed Corazon Aquino as
president. She chronicled these historical events for Time, and in the
book "Impossible Dream: The Marcoses, the Aquinos, and the Unfinished
Revolution." Her final years were spent freelancing for Time and working on
a biography of James Brook, the 19th-century English soldier who was made a
rajah of Sarawak.

WHICH LEADS US TO RESEARCH ON THE WHITE RAJAS as his dynasty was called
that in the usual, colonial way, profited at the expense of the MUSLIMS.
WIKIPEDIA: Sarawak had been a loosely governed territory under the control of the
Brunei Sultanate in the early 19th century. James Brooke (see figure
below) became governor of Sarawak on September 24, 1841 and was
appointed Rajah by the Sultan of Brunei on August 18, 1842; originally
this territory was just the western end of later Sarawak, around
Kuching. He ruled Sarawak until his death in 1868. His nephew Charles
Anthoni Johnson Brooke became Rajah after his death; he was succeeded on
his death in 1917 by his son, Charles Vyner Brooke, with a provision
that Charles should rule in consultation with his brother Bertram
Brooke[1]. The territory was greatly expanded under the White Rajahs,
mostly at the expense of areas nominally under the control of Brunei. In
practice Brunei had only controlled strategic river and coastal forts in
much of the lost territory, and so most of the gain was at the expense
of Muslim warlords and of the de facto independence of local tribes. Sir
James Brooke

The Brooke dynasty ruled Sarawak for a hundred years and became famous
as the "White Rajahs", accorded a status within the British Empire
similar to that of the rulers of Indian princely states. In contrast to
many other areas of the empire, however, the Brooke family was intent on
a policy of paternalism to protect the indigenous population against
exploitation. They governed with the aid of the Muslim Malay and
enlisted the Ibans and other "Dayak" as a contingent militia. They also
encouraged the immigration of Chinese merchants but forbade the Chinese
to settle outside of towns in order to minimize the impact on the Dayak
way of life. They also established the Sarawak Museum, the first museum
in Borneo.

In the early part of 1941 preparations were afoot to introduce a new
constitution, designed to limit the power of the Rajah and give the
people of Sarawak a greater say in government.

While the intention was clearly admirable, the draft constitution
contained defects and improprieties, not least by reason of a secret
agreement drawn up between Charles Vyner Brooke and his top government
officials, by which he was to be financially compensated for this
gesture out of treasury funds.

Japan invaded Sarawak and occupied the island of Borneo in 1941,
occupying Miri on December 16 and Kuching on December 24, and held it
for the duration of World War II until the area was secured by
Australian forces in 1945. The Rajah formally ceded sovereignty to the
British Crown on July 1, 1946, under pressure from his wife among
others. In addition the British Government offered a healthy pension to
sweeten the negotiations. His nephew Anthony continued to claim
sovereignty as Rajah of Sarawak.

After the end of the Second World War, Anthony Brooke then opposed the
cession of the Rajah's territory to the British Crown, and was
associated with anti-secessionist groups in Sarawak. Anthony was
banished from the country. He was allowed to return only seventeen years
later, when Sarawak became part of the Federation of Malaysia.

Sarawak became a British colony (it was formerly an independent state
under British protection) in July 1946, but Brooke's campaign continued.
The Malays in particular resisted the cession to Britain, dramatically
assassinating the first British governor. Sarawak was one of the main
sites of the Indonesian Confrontation between 1962 and 1966. It became
an autonomous state of the federation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963,
despite initial opposition from parts of the population."

So aside from the CRUSADES, you might call it one of the first
incursions from the west into ISLAM. One which is still remembered
with Muslim rage. Now, it could be argued, she was depicting how
benevolent Colonialism was. If that's so, she was SLAMMING
the MUSLIMS for being paranoid about WESTERN PEOPLE. The
RAJAS theme showed The WEST could be respectful.

Others might feel she was slamming the Muslims. I feel that the
book she was doing was not an apologia. It was very PRO WEST
AND MAYBE THEY KNEW IT. She would have been sympathetic
to Muslims being exploited by Brit colonials but that didn't happen. Just
her going near the theme, these bonehead MUSLIMS offed her! As happened 
to the man who wrote SATANIC VERSES. After he published it, Muslims
wished he hadn't and did a FATEH against him. He had to hide for two decades.

My fair lady Gwen never did another book. And oh yes, she never spoke to me again.

<===== BACK TO THE WRITER'S INDEX

<=====  BACK TO THE HOLLYWOOD BOUND INDEX

<===== BACK TO THE FILM INDEX