Critical Mick

Reviews Free of Rules.

Reviews by the Clown that All Other Critics Want to Strangle with a Black Turtleneck

Let Go and Share

John Burdett, author of The Godfather of Kathmandu discusses pop-eyed aggressive giant maniacs in top hats, prescribes a means for developing the most honest police force in Southeast Asia, describes why Mario Puzo is a personal hero and lets Mick know what's even better than good sex. An unruly email interview, March 2010.

Critical Mick: Let's start by getting the banana thing out of the way: in Thailand, is it normal to peel bananas from the bottom? Or was my uncle having me on?

John Burdett: Was your Uncle the same Uncle Oswald of Roald Dahl fame? A fabulous yarner, but not a reliable witness.

CM: Fried scorpions-? Crickets-?

JB: These are on sale on the street every day in Bangkok. Crickets fried in garlic and butter are a common delicacy. Scorpions and similar insects, especially tiny mountains of cooked ants, are also available, but the local preference is for crickets. I am told all such insects are an excellent source of protein – as ["Born Survivor"] Bear Grylls will corroborate. The Thai diet is nowhere near as exotic as the Chinese however: I've never heard of Thais eating dogs or monkey brains, but there is a persistent belief that a well cooked cobra will improve a man's performance in bed, so long as the venom is first removed. We farang should not be judgmental in this respect. My grandmother ate white bread fried in lard every day: is there anything more lethal? (but she lived to the age of 88)

Critical Mick's review of John Burdett's The Godfather of Kathmandu

CM: Your Bangkok-set novels sure deliver a taste of Thailand. Not a chapter goes by, it seems, without Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep and his sidekick Lek heading out onto the food vendors along the city's streets. JB: I must come clean here and confess that IMHO the test of a civilisation lies in its cuisine. Thais are not very different to the French or Italians – or Chinese – in this respect: good food is even better than good sex: you can indulge three times a day with snacks in between without feeling exhausted or nauseous; and you don't make anyone jealous. CM: On the subject of unusual eating in Bangkok: the body discovered as The Godfather of Kathmandu opens has the top of the skull removed and part of his brain devoured. A Thomas Harris homage, I hope, and not a common fate for Westerners who visit Thailand-! JB: The Harris homage is clearly made. I would like to be able to answer that such a fate is quite unheard of in Bangkok and the exclusive product of my fevered imagination. Unfortunately, the [David] Caradine case, which occurred more than a year after I had completed Godfather, has given me a reputation for clairvoyance. Nevertheless, I would say the girls in the bars have more to fear from farang than the other way around.

CM: Let's talk cops. Is it true that in Bangkok, a punishment for bad police is being forced to wear a Hello Kitty armband?

JB: The government has tried everything, including the Hello Kitty armband, designed to shame an errant cop by demeaning his manhood. But you cannot fight poverty with schoolyard psychology. The police are simply not paid enough to keep them honest. I believe economists will tell us that it's all to do with the tax base. I guess one answer would be to legalise prostitution: as by far the biggest industry and the largest employer: the tax revenue might be sufficient to provide the police with a living wage (this option was considered and even planned by Prime Minister Taksin, before a coup d'etat sent him into exile). If they also legalised marijuana and imposed a hefty duty, as we do with the lethal drugs nicotine and alcohol, they might end up with the most honest police force in Southeast Asia – and a lot of very happy tourists.

CM: In Sonchai's department, only Detective Sukum Montri (who's a bit of a joke) is a straight arrow. Top cop Colonel Vikorn keeps a poster against police corruption on his wall as a reminder of where his multi-millions have come from.

JB: Before we get judgmental we must look to historical precedent. The British Empire was financed by opium and slavery. Even after we abolished slavery in the U.K., we continued to buy cotton from Virginia at slave-cheap prices, which is how we got wealthy enough to afford our superiority complex. Vikorn is simply following market forces just like Palmerston & Disraeli, Friedman & Thatcher.

CM: Have you been given any trouble by police, army, HiSo types, and others that are portrayed unflatteringly in your novels?

JB: I have taken the precaution of not having any of the books translated into Thai. Furthermore, police corruption is a constant topic and hardly a day goes by without reports of police and institutional misbehaviour flooding the media. If anything the Thai media pursues the endemic corruption theme with even greater enthusiasm than the English language press, and it is impressed upon us every year just how poorly Thailand scores in the regional corruption statistics. My favourite is the story of two young male cops who proved that two attractive young women were prostitutes by having sex with them for money. Sometimes fiction cannot compete with reality.

CM: If some blow-in arrived here in Dublin and started criticizing the powers that be, I can see him getting a smack.

JB: Your comment on Dublin is noted. I was thinking of basing a book there, but after what you've said I think I'll try Papua New Guinea.

Editor's Note: Just because Mick receives ample smacking doesn't mean anyone else will. It would be fascinating to read how Dublin looks to Thai eyes.

CM: The parties portrayed with the least affection in The Godfather of Kathmandu are Westerners. There's not a one who's given an admirable light in the present or in all of history: all are big fat johns (in the "customer of prostitutes" sense), opium dealers, double-crossing CIA agents, secret members of the underworld, conflicted lesbians or just plain brash, greedy bastards. Is that the way Thais see the outside world? Or is it just Sonchai, pissed off about his absent father and French film buff father figure?

JB: I believe it is the way Thais see Westerners; the earliest representations of farang that I'm aware of can be seen in the Grand Palace: pop-eyed aggressive giant maniacs in top hats. The Thais are not alone. The Cantonese, who were the principal victims of our world opium jamboree in the 19th Century, still refer to us as gwailos: foreign ghosts or demons. Spend an afternoon or evening in one of the down-market expat beach bars and you will see where the Thais are coming from. A large proportion of the heroin trafficking, for example, seems to be financed by Westerners. Indeed, there are persistent rumours that a significant proportion of the funds invested in large real estate projects in Bangkok, often through Wall Street, is the product of Western money laundering. I have no idea if this is true or not, but the rumour itself illustrates the underlying attitude.

CM: The setting of The Godfather of Kathmandu travels from Bangkok to Nepal to Hong Kong. You yourself are English, now resident in Thailand, with a home in France. Where are you right now? Snap a picture out the nearest window and send it along with your answers.

JB: France. Here's the pic. I am also sending one of my good friend who lives in Kathmandu and says Hi.

CM: Did you do any writing yet today? How much? On what?

JB: I'm spending hours on you.

Ed Note: D'Oh! Burdett fans impatient for their next fix now know who to blame. Yet again, "Mick Halpin" proves a tempting name for a minor villain....

CM: How do you do your writing? Pen and paper? Mac? Typewriter?

JB: Generic P.C.'s. The one in France was put together by a Dutchman and the one in BKK was put together by Thai teens. Neither works particularly well, but what can you do?

CM: Obsessive, ignorant punk that I am, I had to complete a lot of research while slowly reading through your novel. I downloaded a series of .mp3s of Tibetan monks chanting after your character heard the same in Nepal, for instance….. are those tones on the stereo in the background as you are working? I've been working, listening to them, but it's not grabbed me yet.

JB: With respect, as lawyers say, I find it hard to believe you read it slowly. Most reports begin something like I read it in a fever – which is the intention.

Editor's Note: Q. How many Mick Halpins does it take to read a book? A: Just one, but it takes him FIFTEEN MILION YEARS.

JB con't: With regard to Buddhist chants – which have little to do with the book although they do provide atmosphere - I think that to get the full value you need to be fluent in Tibetan and/or Pali (forgive me for assuming you are not – Sonchai understands Pali from his year as a monk), although much can be intuited from the enthusiasm of hundreds of monks roaring out the Homage to the Buddha at five in the morning in a temple with good acoustics, incense, candles; I fear much atmosphere is lost when you listen to them on your iPod.

CM: Never mind what Colonel Vikorn thinks- what's your opinion of Mario Puzo?

JB: One of my heroes. He violates every rule of creative writing as taught in writing workshops, especially the highly misleading Show don't tell, to magnificent effect. He knew what most critics do not: people love a damn good yarn and go for the passion and the colour. He was a refugee from genre typing, like me.

CM: And Colin Cotterill?

JB: I must like him because I once blurbed for him.

CM: You two keep getting lumped together in conversations. Set yourself apart! What does he do that you do not? What makes Thailand worlds away from Laos?

JB: The way I write about it. There is simply no comparison. Come on, you've read both of us – I can't think of a single point of similarity. Modern critics in a hurry would confuse snake soup with porridge, and nary an apology.

CM: Let's talk cops, part deux: you father was a London bobbie. What of him is in the detective character that you have created?

JB: Apart from some invaluable insights into procedure, especially arrest and the collection of evidence, not much. He was a very straight guy, with a very typical aversion to working in the small hours, which was called early turn. The only time he cheated was when he found a dead body at about three a.m, which lay half on his turf, half on that of another cop. He dragged it over to the other cop's patch. He hated paperwork. I think Sonchai is probably my idea of the kind of cop I might have ended up as, had I followed in my dad's footsteps. On the other hand, the yarns a police officer on the beat comes home with have stayed with me for life. I grew up with the unspoken knowledge that there was a whole, hidden world to which police have access. The cases my father hated the most were the floaters: dead bodies, invariably suicides, found in the big deep ponds of Hampstead Heath (known as Highgate Ponds): usually men, very often veterans of the War who could no longer live with their demons. They would become bloated after 24 hours in the water. My dad had to go out in a row boat with another cop to hook them in. He had a sensitive stomach and always threw up. There were a huge number of such suicides in the U.K. at that time (the fifties), which the authorities hushed up. I guess I realised from the start that the description of reality offered by teachers and the media was hardly better than fantasy. That's quite a driver for a writer.

CM: Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders: "John Burdett's Bangkok 8, on the other hand, was all local color, all weird exotica, all too much like a travelogue, albeit an especially weird one, for my tastes."

JB: I'm afraid I do not know how to write for the genre bound. It seems to me that a certain breadth and depth is required, along with a basic generosity of spirit, in order to appreciate narratives from distant shores. It is a constant source of surprise to me that private readers from all over the world seem to get it, while a small number of self-styled critics do not. I have never promoted my books as boilerplate police procedurals, which genre, incidentally, leaves me cold.

CM: Paul Garrigan is an Irish-born ex-pat and author who's now living in Thailand. In his memoir Last Escape: Recovering from Addiction at Wat Thamkrabok Paul (like your good self) swears by the power of meditation. Should we give him a nudge up north, introduce him to the blade wheels of Tibetan Buddhism that are so different than what's common in Thailand? Or will the study of that branch blow his mind like it did for Sonchai?

JB: We all need to have our minds blown from time to time. In a way that is exactly what meditation is designed to do. Sure, send him up north. Actually, the result is the same in Theravada or Tibetan Buddhism, so it rather depends on the way you are wired. Being one of those who have lived in their heads all my life, I find the Tibetan path most attractive. Others find solace in ritual. I guess I would say the Tibetan path is better suited to those of us who are easily bored by repetition.

CM: What one tenet / truth of Buddhism does the world most need?

JB: All identity is illusion, so why not let go and share?

CM: What misconceptions about Thailand or Buddhism are you sick to death of correcting to interviewers who only know what they saw in Jean Claude Van Damme's film, Kickboxer?

JB: Poverty, hardship, reverence for family and the austerity of the Buddhist path have made working class Thais tough, honest, tolerant and incredibly patient. They generally loath violence, but when pushed too far are very, very good at it and can become forgetful of their duty to be compassionate. If any of these well-known and easily demonstrated traits are evident in that film, I must have missed them.

CM:Paul Garrigan stated in our interview: "The most surprising thing about Thailand is that the Thais really do think differently from people in the West." I gather from Sonchai's outlook that this is your opinion as well. Please provide some examples for the benefit of farang dudes like me……..

JB example 1: A friend of mine bought a townhouse for his Thai wife's family to live in. They all trooped off to temple to thank the Buddha. It was as if my friend had had nothing to do with it.

JB example 2: A well-meaning and unusually chaste Englishman asked me to accompany him to the bars one evening. He was particularly attracted to one of the girls who assumed, from his attentions, that he wanted to spend the night with her. Overwhelmed by sympathy for her lot (not to mention sublimated lust), and true to his principles, he said he would not sleep with her but would make a free gift to her of whatever fee she had hoped to receive from him. She became enraged and said in Thai: What do you think I am, a beggar?

JB example 3: I invited my Thai wife to France last year and roasted a large chicken. It was too much for the two of us, so I prepared to throw away the remains. She would not let me: This chicken died for us, we have to eat all of it.

CM: What's next for the series? (I've heard you have a fifth written, but then I also heard that the third was to be your last….)

JB: Both statements are true. I have completed a first draft of the next, working title Vulture Peak. Now I have to wait for the great wave of self-congratulation to crash on the rocky shores of editorial reality, so I can clear my head and re-write the thing from scratch. I speak from experience.

CM: What's on your nightstand at the moment? (books, I mean, but other items if you wanna….)

JB: Well you asked for it – this could be the most dangerous question so far:-

Genet's The Thief's Journal, in both English and French Beckett's Premier Amour (he called it First Love in the English version) Beckett's The Unnameable Descartes' Discours de la Methode Saint Exupery's Vol de Nuit Petit Larousse des Vins (the most studied) The I Ching Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake Ulysses Le Guide Gault Millau (1998) Carlos Castenada's The Power of Silence Camus' L'Etranger John Fowles' The Magus Michelin's Camping et Hotellerie de Plein Air 2009.

JB: I propose the last as the most unacceptably erudite, especially since I never go camping. I have a big nightstand.

CM: Many thanks, John!

JB: Om mani padme hum

Yo! This interview transcript and all content on the DFA Guide site are copyright 2010 Mick Halpin. All links to other sites and documents are copyright to whatever source wrote something cool enough for Mick to give it a referral. Try to claim them as your own work and bad karma will catch up with you, baby. Believe it.

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This Page Was Last Updated On 11 March 2010