New York Times - Thomas Fuller (Bangkok Haunts)
At Home Amid the Red Lights
BANGKOK, Oct. 24 — 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!”
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.