Mr. Burdett explores a side of Thai society that has long fascinated Westerners: the apparent willingness of large numbers of women here to sell their bodies without obvious shame; and, in a country where brothels are illegal, the willingness of the police, the government and the society as a whole to look the other way.  Make no mistake, Mr. Burdett’s books are fantasy. A murder victim in “Bangkok 8” is killed by snakes that snap out of hibernation when the amphetamine-laced ice in which they are packed melts.  Yet his writing is also keenly anthropological. He explains the improbable presence of Buddhist shrines at the entrance to many sex bars. He takes us inside brothels, behind the bar, upstairs into the private rooms and downstairs into the members-only sections of Bangkok’s “saunas.” When Mr. Burdett takes the reader to a red-light district during daylight hours, we trust that a bar might really smell like “pine-cleaning fluid blended with stale beer, cigarettes and cheap perfume.”  Mr. Burdett is neither judgmental about prostitution nor particularly probing about its sociological impact. His personal view is that there is nothing to justify.  “Prostitution is the oldest profession that we know of, and it isn’t going to go away,” he said reflexively. “The only time it’s ever gone away is in police states, and even then the police state had to be at its most hysterical.”  In a survey two years ago the Ministry of Public Health counted 13,833 establishments in Thailand — bars, karaoke joints, guesthouses, massage parlors and coffee shops, among other places — where prostitutes and their clients met. Mr. Burdett’s books focus on the relatively small slice of this market that caters to Western tourists, a subculture of freelance bar girls who rarely work under pimps and who not infrequently marry their Western clients, blurring the line between pickup joints and sex for hire.  As part of his research he has traveled to the stilt houses in northeast Thailand, a Lao-speaking region known as Isaan that is the home turf of most of Bangkok’s bar girls. In his books we meet the families these women support financially.  “It’s the story of the country coming to the town,” Mr. Burdett said, peering down the length of Soi Cowboy where the neon lights are so bright they cast shadows. “Here in this street every single one of the girls you speak with will be from Isaan, will be originally a rice farmer.”  In his writing and in his life Mr. Burdett is comfortable around the Isaan migrants. He can name the different types of fried insects they like to eat: crickets, grasshoppers, silkworms, scorpions. He describes his companion, Nit, to whom “Bangkok Haunts” is dedicated, as an “extreme country girl.”  Mr. Burdett too is from a humble background, at least by the standards of his native England. The son of a London policeman, he traces his family back through carpenters and stonemasons on the eastern outskirts of London. There’s scant trace of a cockney accent to his speech, but the class consciousness and tinges of resentment of Britain’s stratified society remain; he no longer considers England home.  “They still ask you what your father did for a living at a perfectly ordinary dinner, so they can establish what place you are in their Hindu caste system,” Mr. Burdett said as he clutched a glass of beer with ice, a combination, popular in Thailand, that might startle an Englishman of any class.  As a lawyer he earned a small fortune in Hong Kong, quit his practice and began writing novels. He now divides his time between Bangkok and a stone farmhouse on the banks of the Lot River in southwest France.  He often makes final revisions to his books on the veranda of his French home, with only oak forests, vineyards and sunflower fields to distract him. It’s difficult to imagine a place farther from the pulsating streets of Bangkok.  “The distance forces the imagination to work,” Mr. Burdett said. “It becomes an imaginative exercise rather than a factual research exercise. It’s a good mental trick to play if you can.”  Perhaps owing to his jaunts in France, Mr. Burdett is able to leap to and from far-flung locales and cultures. Readers are transported from the seediness of a Bangkok brothel to the splendor of the Place Vendôme in Paris. The corrupt Bangkok police colonel who appears in all three books listens to Wagner on his way to the official opening of the whorehouse he helped finance.  Mr. Burdett delivers this grab bag through his narrator, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a cop whose mother was a prostitute and whose father was an American soldier during the Vietnam War. Sonchai is a cultural interpreter par excellence, a cross between Descartes and a Thai palm reader who has flashbacks of travels to Europe with his mother and her various client-lovers.  “I still feel very Thai, despite my straw-colored hair and sharp nose,” Sonchai says in “Bangkok 8.”  The narrator’s frequent reflections on Buddhism complete the cultural mélange. Mr. Burdett himself meditates one or two hours a day.  It’s hard to imagine how the broad and nuanced canvas Mr. Burdett paints in his books could be conveyed on the big screen. But Millennium Films, which recently produced “John Rambo,” the fourth movie in the “Rambo” series, in Thailand, has optioned “Bangkok 8” and is serious about making the film, Mr. Burdett said.  John Thompson, a producer, is currently scouting locations in Bangkok. He said that James McTeigue, the director of “V for Vendetta,” had been hired to direct, and that production would begin in 2008.  “Wherever you place the camera in Bangkok is interesting,” Mr. Thompson said. “This is the only city where the humidity kills you, where the heat and smog make your nose bleed, and you say, ‘I’m never leaving.’”  Mr. Burdett has also completed what he said would be the final installment in the Bangkok series. The book will touch on Myanmar (a choice not motivated by current events, he said) and send Sonchai to the Golden Triangle to investigate a Thai general suspected of running a methamphetamine factory there.  Once the Bangkok series is over, Mr. Burdett says, he wants to diversify away from police thrillers. But he’s quite content staying in Bangkok.  “From a novelist’s point of view it’s a gift,” he said, “because you’ve got so many different things, so many different themes all coming together. It’s a crucible.”
John Burdett has spent the past seven years chatting up bar girls as inspiration for his trilogy, soon to be a quartet, of detective thrillers set in Bangkok’s netherworld.