In recent years that’s become a bit more difficult, as the Thai government and police have cracked down on many of the rackets these drifters and criminals came for. Moore and Burdett had hit on something-that Bangkok was a place where international drifters and those looking to get beyond the long arm of the law had long congregated. There’s been talk of a movie of Bangkok 8 for years, though unfortunately it hasn’t happened yet. Additionally, critics in the US did not universally praise Burdett’s novels-some didn’t like his trawl through the seedy bar streets and red-light district of Bangkok, but to those familiar with the city, the descriptions, while not always easy reading, did strike the reader as truthful. Some critics in Thailand, including the local police, didn’t much like the portrayal of them as often looking the other way when it came to illicit sex, people trafficking and drugs. The sequels Bangkok Tattoo (2005), Bangkok Haunts (2007), The Godfather of Kathmandu (2009), Vulture Peak (2012) and Bangkok Asset (2015) have all found a loyal readership. It initially sold 100,000 copies in the USA and has since been sold into nineteen other territories, remaining a perennial bestseller.īangkok 8, which has its surreal, seemingly drug-induced, moments, was the first in a series featuring Detective Sonchai Litpleecheep, a Thai cop whose mother was a prostitute and father was an American soldier during the Vietnam War (Bangkok was a major R&R destination for US soldiers during that conflict).

Bangkok 8 became legendary reading for those passing through Southeast Asia’s bookshops and airports. His debut novel Bangkok 8 (2003), although not the first crime novel set in the city, was far and away the best to date. Burdett, a policeman’s son from London who “earned a small fortune” in Hong Kong as a lawyer, “retired” to Bangkok and was looking for something else to do.

However, the best known of the foreign (or farang as Europeans are generally known in Thailand) crime writers in Bangkok is probably John Burdett. Moore was perhaps the first successful Bangkok-based writer to start producing locally set noirs that explored the city’s neon-lit back streets and bar areas. There are now sixteen books in the Calvino series starting with Spirit House(1992) right through to the most recent, Jumpers, published in 2016. The books are hard-boiled: think Raymond Chandler in a Thai night market on a typhoon night. The Vincent Calvino private eye series features an ex-New York lawyer of half-Jewish and half-Italian extraction who ends up in Bangkok as a PI.

Moore is a former Canadian law professor turned writer of both fiction and nonfiction about his adopted home of Thailand.

Bangkok 8 by john burdett