Friday, October 26, 2007


At Home Amid the Red Lights

Bookman Beattie is a huge fan of John Burdett's Bangkok novels, which have been reviewed on this blog, so was thrilled to find this story in The New York Times overnight.

Soi Cowboy and other shadowy areas of Bangkok figure prominently in the novels of the English-born former lawyer John Burdett.
As John Burdett ambles down a street packed with girlie bars, he passes two women in skimpy outfits waving their hands excitedly and calling out, “John! John!”


Mr. Burdett has conducted a lot of research for his detective novels in Soi Cowboy, a red-light district in Bangkok.
There are plenty of johns around — this is Soi Cowboy after all, one of the better-attended red-light districts in Bangkok — but the bar girls are waving to John with a capital J, their author friend and confidant. Mr. Burdett waves back.

Mr. Burdett, a 56-year-old former lawyer turned novelist, has spent the past seven years chatting up hundreds of bar girls as inspiration for his trilogy, soon to be a quartet, of detective thrillers set in Bangkok’s netherworld.

“Bangkok 8,” published in 2003, has sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States in hardcover and paperback, according to Nielsen BookScan; rights to the novel have been bought by publishers in 19 other countries. The sequel, “Bangkok Tattoo,” was released two years later; “Bangkok Haunts,” the third in the series, was published in the United States this year and made it onto best-seller lists on the West Coast.

Among critics Mr. Burdett has both ardent fans and equally ardent skeptics. Laura Miller of Salon.com described “Bangkok 8” as a “deliciously fresh breath of air in the often musty halls of detective fiction.” Michiko Kakutani, writing in The New York Times, bridled at the book’s “grotesque, voyeuristic scenes” and found the female characters not “remotely credible.”

Mr. Burdett explores a side of Thai society that has long fascinated Westerners: the apparent willingness of large numbers of women here to sell their bodies without obvious shame; and, in a country where brothels are illegal, the willingness of the police, the government and the society as a whole to look the other way.

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