I've been reading Twilight over Burma, and keep getting the feeling that this is the straight man (à la Gracie Allen, rather than the brother who was happy in Kansas and didn't need to move to San Francisco) with George Burns's part played by Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief. In the first, an idealistic, western-educated Shan prince tries to modernize his country in a decade, before disappearing into the jungle in the custody of the army. In the second, the place is Africa and the time span a few months.
Apart from that and the author's regrettable decision to forgo a ghost-writer, the book is a very enjoyable real-life Cinderella tale ended by a military coup.
