The Buddhist Detective
Dan Katz reviews Bangkok 8 and the recently published Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett Just at the point when I become sick to death of standardised, dull US detective stories and their badly-written British counterparts something comes along to cheer me up: Sonchai Jitleecheep, a Thai detective who is also a flawed and extremely ambivalent character The important thing about noir crime is to put a person who already has lots of problems into a situation where they have little room for manoeuvre. Squeeze them and see what happens. Sonchai has a lot to contend with. For a start he is a Buddhist...