The Delightful Life of an Expat Crime Writer: Fifteen Journeys with Colin Cotterill and Dr. Siri (Soho Press)

Who would imagine that Hercule Poirot could ever be displaced by an unqualified coroner in his seventies who lives in Laos during the 1970s-80s? Or even more surprising, who would imagine that a middle-aged cartoonist with a background in physical education who lives in the depths of Thailand would become one of the English-speaking world’s leading crime writers? 

In 2004, Soho Press published a quiet little mystery called The Coroner’s Lunch that introduced Dr. Siri Paiboon, a medical doctor who becomes national coroner for the country of Laos simply because he is one of the few surviving physicians. Dr. Siri accepts the offer that he really couldn’t refuse and makes the acquaintance of his forensic team, a young nurse with a flair for foreign languages and an assistant with Downs Syndrome. Fortunately both Nurse Dtui and Mr. Geung have absorbed the finer points of Dr. Siri’s new profession. Siri’s contribution to the coroner’s office is a highly developed sense of skepticism and a distaste for bureaucratic obfuscation, which proves useful in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. He also learns that he has an invisible posse dogging his heels—a collection of spirits from the Great Beyond—who both help and hinder what becomes his real vocation. Siri is unable to view a cadaver without discovering its true cause of death and this leads him to amateur detective work, for which he has a natural flair. Joined by Chief Inspector Phosy and a friend of his youth, the irascible Civilai, Dr. Siri makes his way through fifteen books, solving crimes in a leisurely and amiable fashion.

The books that chronicle his crime career are permeated with the placid, unhurried pace of Laos time and many delightfully sarcastic jokes, along with those pesky spirits getting in the way. Over time, the characters grow older and happier. Siri falls in love with Daeng, a gorgeous septuagenarian noodle seller who learned the fine art of killing during the American War, and Dtui and Phosy become a couple. Even Mr. Geung finds love. 

Through the years, the books deepen with historical research, which has all but taken over the latest volume, The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot. When Dr. Siri is sent a package that contains a diary, with the first half written in Japanese and the second in Lao, this provides a serial drama, chapter by chapter, as Siri reads it aloud to Daeng every evening. Gradually an invisible character tries to dominate the book and Siri and Daeng go off to find why the journal ends so abruptly and who the writer truly was.

Suddenly the book becomes suffused with a kamikaze pilot, the Nanjing massacre, the Japanese occupation of Laos, and a fascinating but deeply disgusting pantheon of Japanese ghosts. Siri and Daeng have to work overtime to keep control of the plot but with fourteen earlier adventures under their belts, they’re more than equal to the task.

A man who has given the world fifteen volumes of Dr. Siri in sixteen years, Colin Cotterill is a master of the shaggy dog story, where the punch line is almost incidental to the plentiful and fascinating details. His characters have made these books irresistible, to the point that when the killer is discovered, it’s difficult to care. What draws his readers back are the members of this eccentric, delightful community—oh, and the titles help too. I Shot the Buddha. Curse of the Pogo Stick. Don’t Eat Me. (Cotterill was incensed when Soho said he couldn’t use The Devil’s Vagina for one of Siri’s mysteries. Whatever replaced it was much less memorable than the original, which was a direct translation of the name of a plant that grows in Laos.)

The real mystery at the heart of his latest book comes in a note of thanks at its very beginning. “This last book in the Dr. Siri series,” Cotterill says and ends his thanks with Sayonara. However since Dr. Siri is still alive at the book’s end, let’s hope the man meant “latest,” not “last” and that Sayonara is simply a form of homage to the Suicide Pilot. After all, Siri has the spirit world on his side and his creator has only “a number of deranged dogs,” a truth to which I can testify. I’m putting my money on the eventual reappearance of Dr. Siri.~Janet Brown