[imagesource: GQ Images]

Netflix subscribers should be familiar with The Serpent, an eight-part series that started streaming this month detailing the story of serial conman Charles Sobhraj, played by Golden Globe nominee Tahar Rahim.

Even if you haven’t watched it yet, chances are it has appeared towards the top of the screen, and it’s currently the third most popular show on the streaming giant.

This Is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist is top, with Who Killed Sara? in second, which should give you an idea of just how popular the true-crime genre has become.

Before we get into The Guardian’s Andrew Anthony, detailing his chance meeting with Sobhraj, let’s see the trailer for The Serpent:

Fascinating.

Right, that meeting.

Anthony happened to read Richard Neville’s and Julie Clarke’s book, The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj, and together with a TV crew, tracked him down to a hotel room in Paris in 1997:

 The door opened and he beckoned me in. He looked a curiously slight figure, his skin remarkably smooth, even youthful, given that he’d spent the past two decades in an Indian jail.

Image: Sipa Rex / Netflix

“You must be thirsty,” he said, and held out an already opened bottle of Coke.

This was a test, as Sobhraj was notorious for drugging and killing backpackers.

Definitely the correct choice from Anderson to refuse the drink, although he was forced to hop in a car with Sobhraj en route to a location unfamiliar to him, where he was told he could ask questions.

At this stage, it’s probably best that you go and read The Guardian article itself, which offers enough background to properly contextualise why the meeting was so odd.

The first meeting, I should say, as Anderson would again meet Sobhraj in 2013, in a Kathmandu prison.

Over the course of a couple of mind-boggling hours he recounted a fantastical plot in which he said he had been working for the CIA in a ruse to trap Taliban guerrillas buying arms from the Chinese triads…

The crazy thing is he did have contacts in the Taliban, through a former Islamist cellmate in Delhi, and he probably knew Chinese gangsters from his time flitting about in Hong Kong. But the rest was undoubtedly a product of his pathological imagination.

A ruthless killer, with a story perfect for a Netflix series.

You can read Anderson’s full account of his bizarre meetings here.

[source:guardian]