Dear Farang Reader

Start with somebody talking to you

Two young Thai policemen are stuck at a tollbooth on the expressway in from the airport, one car behind a grey Mercedes. Inside it is an African American marine who, the narrator mentions in his first sentence, is about to die of cobra bites. Neither policeman knows this yet, because the future is impenetrable, says the Buddha. One of them slides down in his seat for a nap, and the narrator observes that survey after survey has confirmed sleep to be his people’s favourite hobby.

A few pages later he explains that the city’s Thai name, Krung Thep, means City of Angels, and that the locals are perfectly content to call it Bangkok instead if that helps separate a foreigner from his money.

His name is Sonchai Jitpleecheep. He is speaking directly to you, he has correctly guessed that you are Western, he knows exactly why you picked up a novel with Bangkok in the title, and he has decided to be very polite about it. Across six books he will call you farang, then dear reader, then Dear Farang Reader, then simply DFR, and finally just R, the way you shorten a friend’s name once you have known them a while.

No other detective in crime fiction does this. It is the reason to read these books, and it is also the trapdoor. You came for the exotic. You are going to be gently and repeatedly told that you are the exotic one.

Sonchai: a bar girl, a marine, and a forest monastery

His mother is Nong, who worked the bars during the Vietnam War and later became a mamasan. His father was an American serviceman on leave who wrote to her every day until something in the war changed him past recognition, at which point she stopped opening the letters because she did not want her unborn son inheriting a murderer’s karma. Sonchai has never met him. Finding him is the thread that runs under all six novels.

His childhood was Bangkok interrupted by the cities his mother’s foreign boyfriends lived in. A German named Fritz took them to Munich, which is why Sonchai speaks flawless English and passable French, and why he can quote your philosophers back at you when he feels like being unkind. In his teens he and his soul brother Pichai ran on yaa baa, stole cars and drove them very fast. That ended the night Pichai killed their dealer with a broken bottle while Sonchai stood there and giggled.

Their mothers sent them to a forest monastery in the far north. The abbot told the two of them they were the lowest form of life in the ten thousand universes. After a year of mosquitoes and meditation, remorse had done its work, and he informed them that they would mend their karma by becoming police officers. His younger brother happened to be Police Colonel Vikorn, chief of District 8. There was one condition attached. They were forbidden to take money. Not merely honest cops. Saintly ones.
Pichai is shot dead in the first novel. Sonchai keeps the promise for twenty years and it costs him exactly what you would expect. He has a reputation across the force for refusing bribes, which means his career is over and everyone knows it. He lives on a policeman’s salary in a hovel by the river while his ten per cent of a brothel’s profits accumulates untouched in a bank account, because he once promised the Buddha he would do something useful with it and has not yet worked out what.

The brothel is the Old Man’s Club on Soi Cowboy, which he co-owns with his mother and his colonel, and which is aimed with real commercial cunning at customers in their seventies and eighties. Sonchai signed the building plans and cut the number of rooms from ten to seven on the grounds that the girls needed somewhere to undress. He works the sound system some nights, playing Elvis for the old men while the girls jive with them. He is a papasan. He hates brothels. He is married to Chanya, a former working girl who is a considerably more advanced Buddhist than he is, and their small son is named Pichai, because he is the reincarnation of the dead one.

The Wheel

The year of meditation left Sonchai with something he treats as a mild affliction rather than a gift. He gets flashes of other people’s previous lives. He looks at a silent Muslim on a barstool and is almost certain the two of them studied together at the great Buddhist university at Nalanda about seven hundred years ago. He follows an FBI receptionist across a courtyard and recognises the courtyard from Egypt. He mentions these things the way you might mention a headache.

Everything else follows from the same source. He reads a corpse as a soul between lives. He remarks that a crooked colleague will come back as a louse in the anus of a dog, and his partner corrects him on the precise sentence, which is eighty-two thousand years as a hungry ghost first. He will stop a murder investigation dead in order to explain the doctrine of dependent origination to you, and to inform you, courteously, that you are a ramshackle collection of coincidences held together by irrational clinging, with no centre at all. This ought to be unbearable. It is not, because Burdett makes him very funny, and because Sonchai always includes himself in the diagnosis.

On the First Noble Truth, that there is suffering, he offers one line of commentary: Only farang ever argue with that one.

And there is the inversion the whole series is built on. Kimberley Jones, the FBI agent who keeps being sent to work with him, finally puts it to his face. He is the son of a prostitute, a pimp, a shareholder in a brothel and an officer in one of the most corrupt police forces in Asia, and he is innocent. She has never broken a law in her life and feels filthy from the moment she wakes. Sonchai does not gloat about this. He cannot afford to. He is honest enough to admit that he owes his own existence to precisely the trade he despises, and that disapproving of it would be a kind of suicide.

Krung Thep, and the Colonel

Burdett lived in Hong Kong and knows Bangkok, and his city is not a postcard. It is the Klong Toey market under an acre of green tarpaulins, chillies laid short and wicked on poor women’s shawls, crabs miming their death agonies in plastic bowls, whole buffalo going under the cleaver, and behind it the port on the Chao Phraya where ships have unloaded since the beginning of time. It is the slum behind the port, five square miles of it, so neatly gridded at the good end that he compares it to ancient Rome. It is the skytrain gliding past the concrete skeletons of towers abandoned in the crash of 1998, where you can see, in the honeycomb of unfinished floors, hammocks and dogs and washing and sometimes a monk in saffron sitting in meditation. It is motorbike taxis, which Sonchai calls the Bangkok helicopter, and heat that makes helmets unthinkable, and temples that are nothing like the ones on the tour, just ramshackle compounds full of hungry cats and mangy dogs and monks of wildly varying commitment.

One detail tells you how carefully Burdett has watched. The bar districts, Sonchai explains, exist behind what he calls invisible screens. Thais fence the foreigners’ bad behaviour into a defined enclave and are discreet on their behalf, in the hope that it will not reach the children. The tolerance is not approval. It is containment, and it is very tired.

Presiding over District 8 is Colonel Vikorn, who is one of the great comic monsters of the genre. He arrives at his own brothel too drunk to stand, hauled out of the limousine by his driver, with the Ride of the Valkyries booming from the car stereo, wearing crumpled cashmere Zegna and wraparound sunglasses, and inside ten minutes the rodent cunning is back in his eyes and he has a plan. He runs the district’s pharmaceutical franchise, wages permanent war with General Zinna of the army over the same trade, and regards Sonchai as some combination of conscience, mascot and, eventually, consigliere. Burdett refuses to make him a villain. He is the system, and the books quietly show you that the system does work, after its fashion, for people the Western one would simply have discarded.

Where to begin

At the beginning, with Bangkok 8 (2003). The six novels form a continuing story, and things that happen in the first book (a death, a promise, a woman, a child) go on mattering to the last. Nothing will prepare you for that opening chapter, and nothing needs to.

Then Bangkok Tattoo, Bangkok Haunts, The Godfather of Kathmandu, Vulture Peak and The Bangkok Asset. One honest warning: they get darker and stranger as they go. The third involves a snuff film and a ghost who will not leave. The sixth wanders a long way toward science fiction. Some readers get off the bus somewhere in the middle. If you do, the first three are a complete and satisfying thing on their own.

Read the author’s note at the front of Bangkok Tattoo while you are at it. Burdett observes that Thailand’s sex industry is smaller per head than in many other countries and merely less coy about itself, and then adds, with a completely straight face, that he has personally never come across police corruption in Thailand in any form. It is the same joke Sonchai has been making at your expense for six books.

Read them for the plots, which are lurid and clever and genuinely surprising. Read them for a Bangkok that no travel writer will give you. But mostly read them for the voice, which is the real invention here: a devout Buddhist policeman who cannot be bribed, who sees your past lives whether he wants to or not, who runs a brothel he is ashamed of, and who has decided that you, sitting comfortably wherever you are sitting, deserve to be told the truth about yourself by someone who likes you.

He is talking to you. He always was. Every time.