For crime writers, Bangkok’s red-light districts and sordid underbelly are gold – no wonder so many fictional detectives pound its streets and back alleys
- Bangkok is the hunting ground of numerous fictional private detectives, who investigate murky cases of greed, murder and deception in the Thai capital
- The city is a haven for expat crime writers, who use its colourful characters – bar girls, ladyboys, drug dealers and hustlers – in their gritty stories
Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a detective of mixed American and Thai descent, hunts killers in Bangkok’s Police District 8. A devout Buddhist, he is guided by his belief in the vagaries of karma.
When a US marine is murdered in peculiar circumstances by venomous snakes, he is on the case. He is also called to investigate the murder of a CIA agent, whose mutilated body is found in a hotel room. For Sonchai, that is just another lurid crime to solve.
Vincent Calvino is made of equally stern stuff. A half-Jewish, half-Italian lawyer from New York, he works in Bangkok as a gumshoe, operating in an environment of sex and sin, greed and graft.
Sonchai and Calvino dwell in the Thai capital’s underbelly of bar girls, streetwalkers, ladyboys, drug dealers, hustlers, swindlers, hoodlums, drifters, pikers and low-lifes. They patronise the city’s red-light districts, where they deal with Russian gangsters, British ne’er-do-wells, Khmer tattoo artists, locals down on their luck, and cops on the take.
They aren’t the only hard-boiled sleuths plumbing the depths of Bangkok’s vices. Take Scott Sterling, a cash-strapped former CIA agent who likewise moonlights as a private eye in a shady netherworld of prostitutes, shifty expats and unceasing debauchery.
Then there is Bob Turtledove, an antiques dealer who goes up against gangsters, hitmen and thuggish Thai boxers. Eddie Dare, a downwardly mobile lawyer from San Francisco, is at it too, chasing a vast stash of stolen Vietnamese money in Bangkok.