Imagine yourself at the promontory of life, a partner in a premier law firm, with a luxury flat on "The Peak" and an eagle's-eye view of Hong Kong's magnificent harbor. Would you throw it all over for the hardscrabble life of a writer?
John Burdett did. He sold his worldly possessions, pocketed the money and, at the ripe age of 50, set out to do what he'd wanted to do all along.
"If the world is telling you you're successful, but you don't feel it, you might as well have failed," he says. Today, at 54, he is the author of two highly acclaimed thrillers starring the incorruptible Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a cop who sees more than his share of corpses, thugs and naked concupiscence in Bangkok bordellos. Book World's Jonathan Yardley called Bangkok 8 "a tour de force." Of its sequel, Bangkok Tattoo , Michael Dirda wrote, "Open this book and you will read on and on, with wide-eyed fascination."
Burdett's forte is shock. But it's his gift for dropping a reader into the marrow of another culture that appeals to the literary-minded. And it's his skill for telling a ripping good tale that has made his books so popular.
Born in North London to a cop and a seamstress, Burdett grew up fascinated with words. Asked by his second-grade teacher to write a few sentences about himself, he produced a 20-page treatise. He went on to major in literature at the University of Warwick, where he reveled in novels by D.H. Lawrence and Graham Greene, but when he graduated in 1973 he was afraid to try to make a living as a writer. He got a law degree instead. Starting out as a London barrister, he eventually was sent to the colonies as a government attorney. After a decade's labors in the criminal courts of Hong Kong, he went into private practice and rose to the top of the venerable firm Johnson, Stokes & Master.
Along the way he managed to produce two novels, A Personal History of Thirst and The Last Six Million Seconds . But they were dashed off in free time, felt like quick work and were greeted by poor sales. He quit his law firm to float around the globe, looking for a venue in which to develop a series of novels around a hard-boiled hero. Settling on Thailand, he began frequenting Bangkok's red-light district, waiting for just the right cop to walk into a bar and inspire him. To pass the time he befriended the bargirls. His big break, as he describes, came when one of them took him home.
"The Bangkok novels are not the work of a young man," he says. "I couldn't have done it without knowing how the world works." Practicing family law in England taught him about the "grueling, wrenching, downright sadistic" nature of human relations. Practicing criminal law in Asia taught him about the grim reality of the streets.
He claims there is no better subject than the gritty city he has adopted. "There's no cushion of gentility here. Life is raw. The people don't lie. You tell me a better place to be a writer."
-- Marie Arana
