Word: sobhraj
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...area of Goa looked like just another tourist. So too did the man who greeted him cheerily, "Hello, Charles. How are you?" The drinker reached for his revolver, and his interlocutor fell upon him and announced his arrest. Thus did Inspector Madhukar Zende, an ace Bombay detective, seize Charles Sobhraj, the international criminal who three weeks earlier had escaped from New Delhi's maximum-security Tihar Central Jail by slipping his guards drugged candies during a mock birthday party...
...returning Sobhraj to justice last week, Zende, who had caught the suspected murderer in 1972, served a kind of poetic justice. The day Sobhraj was arrested was the fugitive's birthday...
...will be one of those lazy tropical afternoons when interest in the case has waned, and the flies buzz and the guards doze in the heat, that Charles Sobhraj will make his move." That prediction, made in 1979 in a best-selling book, The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj, became reality last week. During an impromptu "birthday party" with his jailers at the Tihar Central Jail in New Delhi, Sobhraj plied seven officials and guards with drugged sweets, tied them up, then sped away in a waiting car with six fellow inmates...
...Sobhraj, 42, is known across two continents as a con man, escape artist and master criminal. He had been in jail since 1976 on a murder conviction. Though cleared of that charge in 1983, he was being held for possible extradition to Thailand to face a death sentence for allegedly drugging, robbing and killing several Western tourists. By week's end Indian police had uncovered no trace of the wily crook...
This is the stuff that sells for seven figures in paperback. But the book's commercial value is an added bonus, not something for "serious readers" to turn up their noses at. Thompsons' latest work is psychobiography, whodunit and courtroom drama tied into one, and fused by the enigmatic Sobhraj. The author says he is now at work on his first novel. One can only hope his imagination yields a subject as gripping as the real world...