I review John Burdett's Sonchai Jitpleecheep detective series (all six books)

Here, in order of publication, are my reviews of Mr. Burdett's six books in the series:

Bangkok 8 (Sonchai Jitpleecheep #1)

by John Burdett

This is a fascinating and addictive book. On the one hand, it has many of the familiar characteristics of a Noir novel -- the hard-boiled detective, who is doggedly solving a murder mystery in a sleazy urban setting, with many a plot twist. However, in this story, the sleazy urban setting is in Thailand, and the detective is the product of a union between a Thai sex worker and an American serviceman. He is investigating the murder of his boyhood friend, with whom he went to jail and subsequently to a Buddhist monastery, before joining the police force. Now he is an itchy bundle of contradictions, a compassionate man given to meditation who often has visions of the past lives of the people he meets, but also is hard-drinking and ganja-smoking cop who parties with three hookers because he is ordered to do so by his corrupt police colonel (and obeying orders from one's superiors is part of the 8-Fold Path.) Oh, and by the way, he is carrying out a vendetta and plans to kill the man who killed his friend. He is assisted by a lovely and lusty American FBI agent who is hunting the same quarry, but both of them are distracted by her quite plainly expressed wish to bed our protagonist, who refuses in the interests of his karma. The author makes all these contradictions into the basis for devastatingly dry humor that had me in stitches from page to page.

At the end, the plot twists increase in frequency and amplitude until, at the end, the whole thing crashes into absurdity like a wave hitting a beach. It is an ending that requires a Buddhist-like detachment on the part of the reader.

Bangkok Tattoo (Sonchai Jitpleecheep #2) by John Burdett

Mr. Burdett is today's Raymond Chandler. He's got the sardonic eye for human nature; he's got the gritty setting (actually, his Thailand of the red light districts is way grittier than Chandler's Los Angeles, to the point of being almost psychedelically seamy.) And he's got the hard-boiled protagonist, although, truth be told, his protagonist is a sometimes bewildering combination of hard-boiled, sweetly innocent, and mystical/otherworldly. He's also got the onion-peeling, convoluted plots, where just when you think the mystery has been solved, another layer of intrigue opens up. And he seems to like to to take this process to the point of absurdity at the conclusion of each book -- is he making some sort of Buddhist point with this?

Bangkok Haunts (Sonchai Jitpleecheep #3) by John Burdett

Just as I suspected: toward the end of the book, Sonchai, our Thai noir detective, imagines himself as Philip Marlowe. But Philip Marlowe, of course, never had sexual encounters with ghosts.

The Godfather of Katmandu (Sonchai Jitpleecheep #4) by John Burdett

After the first three novels, Burdett's Sonchai Jitpleecheep series was in danger of becoming formulaic. We have the noir-ish detective, who also helps manage his mom's brothel, and who is passionately committed to Buddhism along with a dollop of superstitious nonsense, and who assists his police colonel in running much of Thailand's narcotics trade. We have a spectacularly gruesome murder which the detective solves gradually through a highly convoluted plot line, which culminates in a spectacular avalanche of weirdness that leaves the reader dazed. That formula worked well for the first three novels, but rather than push his luck, the author has varied it in number four.

This time, he starts with the full-on weirdness. I almost lost interest about a fifth of the way into the book -- he was laying on the magical stuff hot and heavy, introducing a variety of Tibetan characters with supernatural talents. But I'm glad I stuck with it, because the plot began to coalesce and I was hooked for the fourth time. And the ending, this time, was quite down to earth. He also introduces an entirely new facet to his complicated protagonist: the half-Thai, half American Sonchai is also connoisseur of film-making, which provides a major sub-plot for this story. And as usual, there are belly laughs on every page as the protagonist makes sardonic observations about culture, both East and West.

Now, a word about politics. I have relished the political incorrectness of the political commentary in this series. Book #2 has great fun at the expense of America's efforts to make Islam a new enemy image, to replace the sorely missed Communism. This time around, he makes some rather astute observations about the history of narcotics trafficking, correctly identifying the British as the ones who have run it since day one ("The United Kingdom in its modern form is an opium derivative.") But then he falls into a point of view on the relationship between China and Tibet that is so kitschy that I thought for a moment that Richard Gere was co-authoring the book. And he wants to make sure that the reader notices, so he adds a special epilogue to the novel to belabor the obvious. Although the author apparently lives in Asia and seems to follow politics assiduously, he has missed the point about present-day China: China is no longer dominated by the ideas of Marx and Mao, nor those of Milton Friedman. China has moved on. And Tibetans, as part of China, are finally permitted to read and write.

Vulture Peak (Sonchai Jitpleecheep #5) by John Burdett

This one seemed even more Raymond Chandleresque than the first four (even the title screams Chandler). It was less zany in some ways than its predecessors, more of a conventional crime thriller. But the author needed push the envelope in other ways: the crimes are more grotesque, the characters are more grotesque, and the sex is both more explicit and more grotesque. (I won't elaborate beyond mentioning "organ harvesting" and "necrophilia.") So there are the occasional gross-outs, but the pacing and the humor are as sharp as ever.

The Bangkok Asset (Sonchai Jitpleecheep #6) by John Burdett

I read all six of the novels in Burdett's Sonchai Jitpleecheep Series in rapid succession. I am a fan of the "noir" genre, into which Burdett's books fit rather loosely. The dean of the genre, Raymond Chandler, wrote 7 novels, burnishing the basic template of worldly detective, seamy setting, and serpentine plot. Burdett honors the template. The setting in the red-light districts of Bangkok is seamier than Chandler's Los Angeles circa 1945. Detective Jitpleecheep wisecracks as well as Chandler's Marlowe; all six novels rely heavily on his droll observations about Western culture, Eastern culture, and the encounter between the two. Burdett adds to the formula by making his detective devoutly Buddhist, bi-racial, stoned much of the time, a film buff, and a fashionista.

Possibly as insurance against becoming repetitive, he experiments with yet more elements, such as a big dollop of the supernatural in book four, "The Godfather of Katmandu". But I have the feeling that Burdett was ready to move on from the Jipleecheep series, and so he sort of fired off all his remaining guns in this final installment, igniting a sort of Ragnarök of weirdness. Did he neglect to include a lesbian character among all the gays and transsexuals in the first five books? Well, that has been rectified in number six. Was the Tibetan Magick in book four insufficiently psychedelic? Well, this time he plunges headlong into sci-fi, incorporating an emerging race of genetically engineered "transhumans" who are part Robocop and part Frankenstein's Monster (the Mary Shelley version, not the Hollywood version), and for additional spice he folds in the "singularity" notion beloved of Artificial Intelligence enthusiasts. The transhumans are augmented with special technological powers, mischievously called "apps." Then for a bit of verisimilitude, he links all this to the most bizarre US government project to which the US government has ever actually admitted, the LSD mind-control experiments of the 1960s called "MK-ULTRA." The name of the principal villain, "Dr. Christmas Bride," seems to be a nod to Ian Fleming. He also ramps up his hero's drug abuse and Buddhist mysticism and makes the sex more explicit, pushing the general crazed vibe of the book toward critical mass. Although I still enjoyed it very much, this book seemed more labored than its predecessors, and the series ends on a surreal and despairing note.