John Burdett: Detective writer at work in a seedy Bangkok district

As John Burdett ambles down a street packed with girly 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. Burdett waves back.

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

“Bangkok 8,” published in 2003, has sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen BookScan, and foreign rights to the novel have been bought by publishers in 19 other countries. The sequel, “Bangkok Tattoo,” was released in 2005 and “Bangkok Haunts” was published in the United States this year and made it onto best-seller lists on the West Coast.

Among critics, Burdett has both ardent fans and 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 Times, bridled at the book’s “grotesque, voyeuristic scenes” and found the female characters in the book not “remotely credible.”

Reviewing “Bangkok Haunts,” also in The Times, Claudia La Rocco praised Burdett’s “witty, idiosyncratic” storytelling and wondered why Hollywood has yet to put any of his books on the screen. As it happens, Burdett is spending the latter half of October playing host to a scouting team from Millennium Films, who have an option on making “Bangkok 8″ into a movie.

Modern Bangkok is many things to many people. Tourists these days are likely to come for the shopping, the fabulous restaurants, the $5 foot massages and the nearby golf courses and beaches.

But Burdett keeps a tight focus on Bangkok as sin city, a “lusty, clawing” metropolis of exotic bar girls, shady jade dealers, Viagra-popping Western johns and corrupt cops.

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.

Make no mistake, Burdett’s books are fantasy: a murder victim in “Bangkok 8″ is killed by snakes that snap out of hibernation when the amphetamine-laced ice in which they are packed melts.

Yet Burdett’s writing is also keenly anthropological, decorated with wry observations that carry a ring of truth to those who live in Thailand.

He explains the improbable presence of a Buddhist shrine at the entrance to many sex bars. He takes us inside brothels, behind the bar, upstairs into the private rooms and downstairs into the members-only sections of Bangkok’s “saunas.”

When Burdett takes the reader to a red-light district during daylight hours, we trust that a bar might really smell like “pine-cleaning fluid blended with stale beer, cigarettes and cheap perfume,” as he wrote in “Bangkok 8.”

His passages about the sex trade are explicit but not titillating. He is neither judgmental about prostitution nor particularly probing about its sociological impacts. His personal view is that there is nothing to justify.

“Prostitution is the oldest profession that we know of and it isn’t going to go away,” he said. “The only time it’s ever gone away is in police states, and even then the police state had to be at its most hysterical.”

Burdett is clearly more sympathetic to the prostitutes than the aging, Western men they service (“Australians with guts so huge they look about to give birth”).

As part of his research, he has traveled to the stilt houses in northeast Thailand, a Lao-speaking region known as Isaan and the home turf of most of Bangkok’s bar girls. In Burdett’s books we meet the families these women support financially.

“It’s the story of the country coming to the town,” Burdett said, peering down the length of Soi Cowboy where the neon lights are so bright they cast shadows. “Here in this street, every single one of the girls you speak with will be from Isaan, will be originally a rice farmer.”

In his writing and in his life, Burdett is comfortable around the Isaan migrants. He can name the different types of fried insects they like to eat – crickets, grasshoppers, silkworms, scorpions, etc. He describes his girlfriend, Nit, to whom “Bangkok Haunts” is dedicated, as an “extreme country girl.” Without Isaan people, Thailand would have much less appeal for him.

Burdett, too, is from a humble background, at least by the standards of his native England. The son of a London cop, he traces his family back through carpenters and stonemasons on the eastern outskirts of London. There’s scant trace of a Cockney accent but the class consciousness and tinges of resentment of Britain’s stratified society remain; he no longer considers England home.

“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,” Burdett said as he clutched a glass of beer on ice, a combination, popular in Thailand, that might startle an Englishman of any class.

As a lawyer, Burdett earned a small fortune in Hong Kong. He quit law and 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 in the veranda of his isolated French country 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.

Bangkok’s bookshops are chock-a-block with bad bar-girl fiction. But Burdett stands out for his ability to blend convincingly details of the sex trade with food, superstition and global politics.

He delivers this grab-bag through his narrator, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a cop whose mother was a prostitute and father 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 clients-cum-sugar daddies.

The narrator’s frequent reflections on Buddhism complete the eclectic but coherent cultural melange. Burdett himself meditates one or two hours a day.

It’s difficult to imagine how the broad and nuanced canvas that Burdett paints in his books could be conveyed on the big screen.

Millennium Films, Burdett said, is “serious” about making “Bangkok 8.” “My guess is that they will go for atmospherics,” Burdett said. Millennium recently produced the upcoming Rambo sequel, also shot in Thailand.

“We are definitely making the film,” said John Thompson, the co-producer from Millennium who is currently scouting for locations in Bangkok. James McTeigue, who directed “V for Vendetta,” the 2005 sci-fi thriller starring Natalie Portman, has been hired as the director, Thompson said, and production will begin in 2008.

Burdett has also completed a draft of the final installment in the Bangkok series. The book will touch on Myanmar (purely coincidental despite current events, he says) and features Sonchai going up to the Golden Triangle to investigate a Thai general who allegedly runs a methamphetamine factory there.

Once the Bangkok series is over, Burdett says he wants to diversify away from police thrillers. But he’s quite content staying in Thailand.

But he also worries that his Bangkok series could eventually rankle the wrong people in Thailand: the image of corrupt Thai cops investing in go-go bars may not dovetail with the “Amazing Thailand” advertising campaigns.

“My fear, because I like living here,” he said, “is that they’ll take exception to the books and kick me out.”