By Michael Dirda
Sunday, May 15, 2005

BANGKOK TATTOO

By John Burdett. Knopf. 302 pp. $24

How important is good plotting to the mystery and thriller? In The Big Sleep , Raymond Chandler kills off a chauffeur but never actually accounts for the murder. Who did it? asked one of the screenwriters working on the film version of the novel. (He was a Hollywood hack named William Faulkner.) Chandler didn't know and couldn't really say.

Because The Big Sleep is so beautifully written, few readers much care that its plot is somewhat ramshackle. We turn to its pages for other reasons -- the sound of Philip Marlowe's weary, wise-cracking voice, those dazzling similes and descriptions, that portrait of a corrupt, over-ripe Southern California.

John Burdett's Bangkok Tattoo , a follow-up to the wildly lauded Bangkok 8 , offers some of the same sorts of pleasure. The narrator, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, works as a detective for the Royal Thai police force; his mother -- a retired whore -- runs a bar/brothel; and his boss, a police colonel, is the Thai equivalent of a suavely shrewd and charmingly unscrupulous Mafia godfather. The novel opens when Chanya, the most popular working girl at The Old Man's Club, apparently murders one of her clients by cutting off his penis and slicing up his abdomen. At first, Col. Vikorn and Sonchai plan to cover up the killing of this farang , or foreigner; after all, they both have a monetary interest in Chanya's well-being. But then they discover that the skin has been flayed from the victim's back. Why?

Anyone who's read Ellery Queen or John Dickson Carr won't have any difficulty figuring out the answer. Moreover, despite the novel's trappings, there isn't really much of a mystery here. For no good reason, Chanya doesn't simply blurt out all that she knows, and Burdett delays her full explanation for a couple of hundred pages. This allows him to develop several subplots (Thai police and army rivalry, inept CIA agents baying for al Qaeda terrorists, the plight of moderate Muslims in the post-9/11 world), while he also goes about explaining some fundamental Buddhism, portraying in rather lip-smacking detail the lives of Thai prostitutes in Bangkok and Washington, and generally keeping the fascinated, slightly appalled American reader turning the pages as fast as possible.

Why appalled? To start with, because of the novel's casual -- indeed admiring -- attitude toward the sex industry, which Sonchai and his mother, Nong, view as crucial to the Thai economy and in no way demeaning to its young entrepreneurs:

"The bottom line," explains Nong during a radio interview, "is that for more than three decades the people of Isaan have been kept alive by what little cash their daughters in Bangkok have been able to send home. There are whole towns, roads, shops, farms, water buffalo, cars, motorbikes, garages -- whole industries that owe their existence to our working girls. These courageous young women are the very essence of the female genius for sustaining, nurturing, and honoring life with life. They are also everything that is great about the Thai soul, with their selfless devotion and sacrifice. They ask for no help or gratitude, they don't expect admiration, they gave up looking for respect decades ago, but they are the heart of our country."

In no way does Nong seem to be speaking ironically. Nor is a Muslim imam when, discussing the murder victim, he comments on American emptiness and hypocrisy:

"But what of these products of capitalism like Mr. Turner? Human souls locked out from God forever. One hears their screams of anguish even while they drop their bombs, these young people who have no idea who they are. They think they are killing others. They are killing themselves. I warned him of his death wish, but a good part of his identity had already been annihilated. He was a collection of cover stories. . . . The Americans will be sending agents very soon, and everyone knows how dishonest they are. Would people who invade sovereign countries on false pretenses stop at anything?"

Col. Vikorn candidly reveals an even harsher view of the United States, spoken not in anger but with his characteristically urbane political realism: "The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that. What is the West but a gigantic supermarket? And who really wants to die for a supermarket?"

Culture shock is Burdett's principal narrative trick, and he exploits it for all it's worth. People are killed in the most obscene fashion, even as the police practice their own casual brutality:

"The telephone book is the interrogator's best friend in these parts. Inserted between boot and perp, it prevents all signs of physical abuse without detracting too much from the point of the exercise." Later, we learn that "for once the jailer has exercised compassion in that he has used padded, hospital-style restrainers instead of his usual chains."

As in a Ross Thomas or Andrew Vachss thriller, Bangkok Tattoo proffers an assortment of dreamers, grotesques and criminals -- not only prostitutes and corrupt cops but also opium addicts, crime lords, tattoo artists, the spirits of the dead, transsexuals, the Yakuza, religious fanatics, even a lesbian CIA operative. One major drug trafficker appears only after he is dead:

"In a room adjacent to the lounge, Joey is embalmed à l'americaine in a characteristic pose from life, sitting in a director's chair holding a mobile to his ear, a cigar in the other hand, an open-neck Gucci shirt and jacket, smart YSL slacks, and multicolored loafers. His huge smile, acrylic in intensity, perfectly fits the house theme. In a neat melding of cultures Mu [his widow] has surrounded him with gold images of the Buddha in his various postures, and electric imitation votive candles flicker everywhere ."

Burdett -- a "nonpracticing lawyer" who now lives in Hong Kong -- is particularly good, too, at evoking the hurly burly of Bangkok, its streets packed with food stalls selling insect delicacies and the almost addictive Thai fruit called durian, the cars stalled in enormous traffic jams, call-in talk shows blasting from radios, gross Americans seeking young flesh and imitation Rolexes, live-sex shows and bars and open-air bazaars:

"The talat (market) is the emotional center, a square acre of green umbrellas and tarps beneath which chilies lie short and wicked on poor women's shawls; chickens cram together dead or alive; ducks grumble in wooden cages; every kind of crab mimes death agonies in plastic bowls or gasps in the heat (both fresh-and saltwater, soft shell or hard); open-air butchers chop up whole buffalo; jackfruit, pineapple, orange, durian, grapefruit, bolts of cheap cotton, every kind of hand tool for the third-world handyman . . . There are even some corrugated iron shacks nearby from the skullduggery school of architecture, joined clandestinely by precarious walkways that cry out for a chase scene, but most of the buildings surrounding the square are three-story shop-houses of the Chinese tradition. The sidewalks provide good clues as to the business of the shops: whole automobile engines pile up outside their ateliers dripping black oil; air-conditioning ducts of all dimensions stand proud outside another; CD rip-offs on stalls, the latest boom boxes block the way outside the stereo store."

Sonchai tells this rambling story in an engaging, ingratiating voice, directly addressing the (presumably American) reader as "farang." Sonchai's attractiveness goes far in softening the novel's violence and grotesquerie. He is loyal to those he admires (his mother, his colonel), kind to his friends (he agrees to help pay for a young man's sex-change operation), attentive to the burdens of karma and the world of spirits. At one point he locates a key figure in the novel by emptying his mind and simply wandering at random until he is led to the proper door. He also longs to meet his American father, whom he has tracked down with help from a friend in the FBI. Perhaps he will in his next adventure.

Open Bangkok Tattoo and you will read on and on, with wide-eyed fascination, some horror or disgust and considerable delight. Still, there's no disguising the fact that the book's a structural mess, with lots of loose ends -- very little is done with the moderate-Muslims subplot, Sonchai uses neither the machine pistol the colonel gives him nor the emergency autodial number he is asked to punch into his cellphone, Chanya had no good reason to withhold the truth about the murder. What's more, there's an almost prurient emphasis on the sex industry, as if Burdett were hoping to titillate as much as shock. Perhaps so. Much of one chapter simply describes the dress codes and working personae of some half-dozen sweet young things in hot pants, see-through blouses and stiletto heels.

By turns sordid, disorienting and, at its heart, accepting and good-natured about our flawed human condition, Bangkok Tattoo is as seductive as Chanya, Nat, Marly, Lalita or any of the other girls at The Old Man's Club. And that's saying something. If you're looking for a good time, look no further. ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is dirdam@washpost.com. His weekly discussion of books takes place Wednesdays at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.