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The detective figure, literary and real, emerged in Siam between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to bring clarity to increasingly complex social and political situations. In early detective fiction including the Seup saphakan [ | Investigating it All] (1892–97) and Nithan Thorng-in [ | The Tales of Thorng-in] (1904–05) series this was certainly the case – mysteries were solved, secrets revealed. In real life, however, the state's deployment of an army of detectives did not so much clarify as codify mysteries. This paper examines the links between the literary and the real detective, arguing that the appearance of detective fiction provided the vocabulary for understanding and dealing with social and political change in early twentieth century Siam.

In March 1973, a villager working for a logging concession in Northeastern Thailand was shot and killed under mysterious circumstances. The story did not make the news and would likely have been forgotten if not for another, more sensational murder-suicide a few weeks later. Working through news reports in the country's number one daily about these two crimes, this article brings to light the understudied terror and violence that plagued parts of rural Thai society preceding the mass protests against a corrupt military government in October 1973. At the same time, it analyzes how information about that violence became known, verified, and accepted as true to an urban audience in Bangkok. Tackling the issues of violence and information together, the author links the relatively abstract concepts of “knowledge production” and “justice” in a tangible case study, showing that the form that information takes and the technologies that produce it play a key role in determining its factuality. The author concludes...