There’s an interesting art exhibition called “Lost in the City” going on right through March at Bangkok’s tourist-gluepot Jim Thompson House, which sells the fine Siamese silks popularised by the American businessman after he gave up being a secret agent.

March 21, 2006, would have been Thompson’s 100th birthday, and this coming March 26 will be the 40th anniversary of his strange disappearance. Together these seem to constitute a fair enough occasion for the silk-shop-cum-museum to try and lure even more visitors than the 150,000 it currently has every year. So Jim’s former colleague William M Booth hired Navin Rawanchaikul to do the show. Navin’s made an appearance at Dali House already.

The exhibition has a mock Bangkok street scene with vendors’ carts, a life-size fibreglass depiction of Thompson and his pet cockatoo Cocky and some other multimedia, but the best part, I think, is the four-volume comic-book series that Navin wrote and had the Nikorn Tha-Pra Studio illustrate.

A clever choice for comics-crazy Thailand, the series — in Japanese as well as English and Thai — is a fantasy about Jim showing up out of the blue at a Bangkok bus terminal and struggling to find his way back to his house through the chaos of the modern metropolis.

Navin appears in the cartoons himself as a tuk-tuk driver who agrees to help Thompson get home, and along the way, with the flapping of Cocky’s wings cueing flashbacks, there’s a history of Bangkok along with the whole story of Jim Thompson.

It’s a quirky but fascinating perpective, but neither Navin nor anyone else could come up with anything nearly as interesting as the facts of Thompson’s spooky vanishing act in the Malaysian jungle on Easter Sunday 1967. Anyone with Google Earth can take my posted tour here.

The basics: Thompson was an operative of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, who was being parachuted into Japanese-occupied Bangkok just as news arrived of the war’s end. Most of the spooks went straight back home, but Alexander MacDonald stuck around and founded the Bangkok Post and Thompson made himself a wardrobe of silk.

Both of these careers were covers, as far as I’m concerned. With communism sniffing the Asian air, Thailand was still “hot”.

Jim’s silk business took off and, ostensibly needing a break, he had a holiday with friends in Malaysia’s breezy Cameron Highlands. One day he walked off alone into the woods, leaving even his cigarettes behind, and never came back. Intensive searches turned up nothing.

Dropped dead and swallowed by insects or tigers? Blowgunned by natives and boiled in a stew? Run over by a speeding truck and buried in a shallow grave? Fallen off a cliff and swept away by a river?

Or did he arrange his own disappearance and find a new life elsewhere, perhaps for love, perhaps out of boredom, perhaps because his spying days had got him in a bind? Was he abducted by the enemy or spirited away by fellow agents? Or was he killed on behalf of the Thai government?

All of these theories and more have been discussed at length in a pair of books, William Warren’s 1970 “The Legendary American: The Remarkable Career and Strange Disappearance of Jim Thompson” and Edward Roy De Souza’s much more recent “Solved! The Mysterious Disappearance of Jim Thompson, the Legendary Thai Silk King”. The latter is excerpted online at the broadly informative Cameron-Highland-Destination.com.

The trail looks something like this …

You can rent a bed today at the Tudor-fanciful Moonlight Bungalow in Tanah Rata in the Cameron Highlands. The four-room, colonial-era cottage was owned by Singaporean-Chinese chemist Tien Gi Ling and his American-born wife Helen when Jim and his long-time friend Constance Mangskau, 59, arrived for their third visit on March 24, 1967.

Tanah Rata means “flat land”, and there is a bit of a plateau here at this huge former hill station, a holdover from stiff-upper-lip, time-for-a-Tiger days.

The highlands take their name from William Cameron, who surveyed the area for the British in 1885 and claimed he saw “a vortex in the mountains”, though I don’t think he was referring to anything that might account for Jim Thompson going missing.

The local governor, Sir Hugh Low, got high on the idea of developing a “health resort” where his countrymen could cool down in the uplands. This roller-coaster of planning culminated in sprawling tea estates, strawberries (including a variety called Fresno, for some reason) and honeybees at an apiary that also shows off its butterflies, scorpions, chameleons and rhinoceros beetles.

During the day the temperature tops off at 25 Celsius; at night it can drop to 3. Perfect weather for growing tea, in fact.

James Harrison Wilson Thompson was born on March 21, 1906 in Greenville, Delaware, attended boarding school, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Architecture, then designed some homes for wealthy East Coasters before joining the National Guard. He was a lieutenant in the OSS when the war ended.

As his involvement with silk was developing, Thompson bought a share in Bangkok’s Oriental Hotel and lived there for more than a year despite the management’s efforts to get rid of him. (They make no mention of this any longer. The photo of Jim and some samples, taken at the Oriental, is from the hotel’s just-reissued history-cookbook, which I recently reviewed.)

The hand-weaving of silk had been all but abandoned in Thailand when Thompson rode in with the cavalry and gave the fabric the goose it needed to become a global commodity. That must have been acceptable enough to the Thai government, but his ambitious collection of Southeast Asian ceramics, sculpture, and artefacts ticked off the locals. There were Ming pieces, Siamese and Khmer stone figures, Burmese statues and a dining table once used by King Rama V. This was colonialism of a different sort, and they’d just got rid of the Japanese.

No one I’ve come across has described Mr Jim as an Ugly American, but after forming the Thai Silk Company with George Barrie in 1948 he was boisterous, entertained often and sumptuously, and was given to jarring mood swings, the last aspect in particular attributable to his suspected undercover work.

The antiques collection got so big that he had to build a massive residence. In 1959 Thompson bought six traditional wooden houses in the ancient capital of Ayutthaya and had them shipped to his property on the side of Bangkok Klong Maha Nag canal, directly opposite the weaving community of Ban Krua, where they were reassembled as one very large home.

Building his silk business involved lots of travelling around the country, sometimes to examine caves whose patterns could be transposed onto silk, but usually to meet weavers and silkworm cultivators. Intriguingly, most of these people were based in mulberry-festooned Korat, in the Thai northeast, and that’s the place from where Uncle Sam was keeping an eye on the communists further north and east.

Korat was host to a massive US bomber base by the time Thompson went missing. His buddy was in charge there, and there are those who believe Jim was whisked away from the jungle by one of the commander’s helicopters. There’s still a Veterans of Foreign Wars club in Korat, in a hotel where I spent a few nights in 1994. The ageing American Vietnam vets get bent there every night.

Thompson was 61 when he and Constance went on holiday (the portrait of her here is from Navin’s comic book series). He met her at Don Muang Airport as planned, but had somehow neglected to get his departure papers in order.

She talked their way out of the country and they flew to Penang, where Jim was still preoccupied with business details. They hired a car to look around the Malaysian island, but Thompson suddenly insisted he needed a haircut and they headed back to the Ambassador Hotel in Georgetown, the state capital.

Finally they reached Tanah Rata and the Moonlight Bungalow, just up the hill from the golf course at the Cameron Highland Resort. Among the organised treks offered by the resort today is the “Jim Thompson Mystery Trail”. It comes with a survival kit. The nearby Strawberry Park Resort also has a Jim Thompson Terrace among its dining facilties.

Navin’s fibreglass sculpture of the “returned” Thompson and his cockatoo.

On Saturday morning, March 25, Thompson and Dr Ling went out to explore a new trail and got lost. By the time they found a stream and followed it out of the jungle they were frazzled and shaken, and Ling had pulled a ligament, but Jim was elated by the adventure.

On Sunday morning the four friends rose early with plans for church and a picnic on Mount Brinchang. Jim first went for a walk, then met them at a nearby road junction. After church they went back to the bungalow for their picnic hampers, where Thompson had to be talked into going through with the plan. At the picnic site he seemed troubled by something and the outing was cut short.

Back at the cottage the others had a nap, leaving Jim sitting in the hall. At some point he just left, leaving behind his pill box, cigarettes and lighter. He’d told the others on a previous visit that he’d been stung near a hornet’s nest in the woods and planned to revisit it this time.

A montage from Nawin’s show, depicting the artist seated next to Thompson on Bangkok’s elevated railway.

By 6pm Jim still hadn’t returned. His companions called his rental agents, then Ling went to see the police. By the time Ling got back there was a British army major waiting for him, and they searched nearby. The searches became wider and increasingly elaborate over the next few days.

On Wednesday the 29th a cook at the Lutheran Mission bungalow told police she’d seen Jim on Sunday at about 4pm when he stopped to gaze silently at the garden, then headed back the way he’d come. He’d also been spotted at the same time on a rise opposite the Overseas Mission Fellowship bungalow. An employee of the Eastern Hotel, now the New Garden Inn, saw someone resembling him heading toward the golf course.

Constance, meanwhile, was recalling for police their trip a few years earlier to the Himalayas, when Thompson had gone missing for almost four weeks, only to reappear weak and exhausted. She said Jim “was in the habit of losing himself” and suggested he’d been in “one of his unpredictable moods” when he sauntered off into the jungle.

The Thai Silk Company offered a $10,000 reward for Thompson’s recovery, sparking rumours of a kidnap, though no demand for a ransom was ever made. On March 30 company staff gathered in a candlelit room with a young woman who claimed she could locate him through prayer. She claimed Jim was being held captive in the jungle by two gunmen.

In Tanah Rata another medium insisted Jim was “alive but possessed by evil spirits” but would return on his own the next morning. When that didn’t happen he decided that Thompson could be found “in a hole under a large tree which is not far from the bungalow”, too weak to call out. More searches found nothing, obviously.

When Dr Ling returned to Singapore a man who identified himself as Michael Ian Vermont arranged to come to his home, where he told the dentist that Jim was being kept at a house in Tapah that he could pinpoint if they went back.

Meanwhile Brigadier General Edwin Black, chief of the American support forces in Thailand, consulted a mystic who identified a spot on a map. The general flew into the highlands for the hunt, but again to no avail.

On April 23, Richard Noone, a British anthropologist and planning officer with the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation who had extensive jungle experience, went into the woods with native trackers and a witch doctor. They scoured the area for three days and found nothing.

At the same time, Peter Hurkos, the Dutch psychic investigator famous for not solving the Boston Strangler case (and, later, for not solving the Manson massacres), arrived with Lt Dennis Horgan, Gen Black’s aide and, after mumbling in a trance about a truck and chloroform, concluded that Thompson had been abducted to another country, and not for ransom.

The showman psychometrist, who’s pictured above with the Philippines’ long-time ruler Ferdinand Marcos, went back home, already six years overdue on his prediction of his own death, and waited another 21 years for it to actually occur, in 1988.

Back in Thailand, there was speculation that Thompson was perhaps paying the price of being careless with one of the sacred images he’d acquired. He may have positioned one inappropriately in his house and, in punishment, the spirits were making him wander around in circles somewhere.

If it was a curse, suggests Francine Mathews, it was woven into politics. “Caught in a ring of fire in Southeast Asia, battling conflicts on every side, the United States needed Thailand in its corner,” she writes. “Who knows exactly what the army might have done in return for Thai gratitude?”

The mystery novelist based her 2002 “The Secret Agent” on Thompson’s life, having followed his Asian trail three years earlier and written of the search for the Princeton Alumni Weekly. The tale is also online here.

Korat’s silk-OSS connection led Mathews to conclude that Thompson was threatening to expose the murderer of King Rama VIII, brother of the current monarch, who was shot in his palace bedroom in 1946, “paving the way for an authoritarian coup”. The new Thai government didn’t want the information known.

The last king’s murder is is still a very tricky subject in Thailand. The newspapers only touch on it when necessary and with extreme stealth, referring to it only as “mysterious”. There was a trial afterward, but no lasting convictions.

The reason Mathews offers for Thompson’s threat is that the government wanted his priceless art collection, which he intended to leave to his family in the US. She cites “the matter of American choppers landing in the Highlands, and the body that was never found” and the fact that Thompson’s sister was murdered in her home back in the States during a bungled burglary six months after Jim disappeared.

Thompson’s great-nephew has said the family believes she was killed by someone looking for Jim’s last will, which bequeathed his estate to his extended family (he’d originally bequeathed everything to the Siam Society, a respected research group). In the end, however, the Thai government owned his collection, which along with the house is now administered by the Jim Thompson Foundation under royal patronage.

For a look at the house and museum and a waxen version of the above story, visit JimThompsonHouse.com.