John Burdett

JOHN BURDETT

When John Burdett wants to get away from it all, he doesn't go to a seaside resort, a cabin in the woods or a bed and breakfast. Instead, he unwinds in Thailand, world-renowned for its hospitality--and its notorious underworld, where Burdett chats up the teenaged prostitutes and katoeys (transsexuals). As an attorney in Hong Kong for twelve years in the 1970s and 80s, the Englishman worked "during a period when [Hong Kong] was said to be second only to Beirut in terms of stress . . . Thailand was the only place to really relax."

An aspiring novelist, Burdett left his law career and Hong Kong behind, living in France and Spain to write A Personal History of Thirst, and The Last Six Million Seconds, two thrillers acclaimed for their intricate plotting and international perspective. Now back in Hong Kong (the setting for The Last Six Million Seconds), Burdett gives the full book treatment to his unlikely vacation spot in Bangkok 8. At the beginning of his enterprise, the writer was merely looking for an exotic, Third World location in which to spin his next mystery. "How many detective thrillers have you read that are not based in New York, L.A., London or Paris?" he writes at powells.com. Although Morocco was an early candidate, he realized that Bangkok--with its famous sex industry as well as a unique Buddhist tradition--presented a cultural and socioeconomic milieu too fascinating to leave unexamined.

He exhaustively researched the recent history of the city's "black economy" and law enforcement, poring through archives of the Bangkok Post and numerous academic works, including one groundbreaking paper, "Guns, Girls, Gambling and Ganja." At a monastery a few hundred miles north, he took a two-week meditation course in Theravada Buddhism; in Thailand, fervent belief in karma and reincarnation is notably pronounced, particularly among the older generations.

Just as enlightening were Burdett's extensive interviews with Bangkok's prostitutes. To Burdett, the young women and men inspired neither pity nor disgust, but admiration--they call the shots with their clients, speak several languages, send a majority of their earnings home to their rural families, dress "like fashion models," maintain jovial, compassionate demeanors and retire at 30. One interviewee included a male-to-female transsexual, raising funds for the final step of surgery--partly to placate the wishes of a lover but mostly to increase her marketability to Westerners. "It struck me . . . how radical Western consumerism can be in its effect on the Third World," he writes.

To accurately portray the moral complexities of Bangkok's underworld, Burdett called upon his distinguished career in the public and private sectors of Hong Kong law. "Like a cop, I've had professional experience in many strata of society and have a good idea of the extent to which peoples' lives are shaped by law and the extent to which law needs to be customized for survival purposes."

His final product, says Harper's magazine, is "as exotic as it is entertaining, and as provocative as it is obscene."