“They still ask you what your father did for a living at a perfectly ordinary dinner, so they can establish what place you are in their Hindu caste system,” Mr. Burdett said as he clutched a glass of beer with ice, a combination, popular in Thailand, that might startle an Englishman of any class.

As a lawyer he earned a small fortune in Hong Kong, quit his practice and began writing novels. He now divides his time between Bangkok and a stone farmhouse on the banks of the Lot River in southwest France.

He often makes final revisions to his books on the veranda of his French home, with only oak forests, vineyards and sunflower fields to distract him. It’s difficult to imagine a place farther from the pulsating streets of Bangkok.

“The distance forces the imagination to work,” Mr. Burdett said. “It becomes an imaginative exercise rather than a factual research exercise. It’s a good mental trick to play if you can.”

Perhaps owing to his jaunts in France, Mr. Burdett is able to leap to and from far-flung locales and cultures. Readers are transported from the seediness of a Bangkok brothel to the splendor of the Place Vendôme in Paris. The corrupt Bangkok police colonel who appears in all three books listens to Wagner on his way to the official opening of the whorehouse he helped finance.

Mr. Burdett delivers this grab bag through his narrator, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a cop whose mother was a prostitute and whose father was an American soldier during the Vietnam War. Sonchai is a cultural interpreter par excellence, a cross between Descartes and a Thai palm reader who has flashbacks of travels to Europe with his mother and her various client-lovers.

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