Laos may seem an unlikely setting for a series of terrifically beguiling detective novels steeped in local color and history. But look at what ingenious use Alexander McCall Smith's No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency books make of the equally exotic culture of Botswana.
Now look at Dr. Siri Paiboun, the septuagenarian coroner at the center of an outstanding string of books by Colin Cotterill. Dr. Siri, as he is called, is every bit as eccentrically winsome as Smith's Precious Ramotswe, and neither is a sleuth in any hard-boiled sense.
It's just that, as his country's national coroner Dr. Siri often finds himself on an intimate basis with the dead. And inevitably certain questions arise. That Dr. Siri's body is host to the spirit of a thousand-year-old shaman only makes his intuition that much stronger.
This series first appeared here less than three years ago with The Coroner's Lunch, which is set in 1976. (The British-born Cotterill, who has been a cartoonist and teacher and worked in refugee camps, has written assorted other books that have not reached American readers; some are available only in Thai. He lives in Thailand.)
By the time of Anarchy and Old Dogs, the fourth Dr. Siri book, it is 1977, and Laos has not changed for the better. Dr. Siri lives in the historian's nightmare: interesting times. In 1975, in the wake of the Vietnam War, the Pathet Lao overthrew the country's monarchy and assumed control. In the language that makes these books so attractively sardonic, Cotterill writes that "the government was starting to look like a depressingly unloved relative who'd come to visit for the weekend and stayed for two years."
Dr. Siri's long experience has inevitably left him skeptical. Educated in Paris in the 1920s, he returned to Laos in 1939 and joined the Free Laos (or Lao Issara) resistance against French rule. By now, as Siri's best friend puts it, "80 percent of our topic of conversation is about the inadequacy of our government, the government we fought for 30 years to install." Cotterill's Laos is populated by bureaucrats, deflated revolutionaries and covert royalists who secretly lament socialist rule.
Cotterill has a deft way of weaving these circumstances into whimsical, more personal stories that feature Dr. Siri and an equally memorable set of supporting characters. It is not unusual to find a renegade Thai forest monk or a transvestite fortuneteller wandering casually through the capital city, Vientiane, where Dr. Siri works. And no one seems wildly surprised when, in the event that kicks off this book, a blind dentist on a bicycle is run over by a logging truck. But when it develops that the blind dentist was en route to a post office to pick up a coded message written in invisible ink, curiosity becomes impossible to avoid.
The anarchy of the book's title is a prospect raised once the message is deciphered: It appears to signal an imminent military coup. And one of the old dogs is, of course, Dr. Siri. The other is his best friend, Civilai, a senior member of Laos's Politburo. Together they are "undiplomatic old coots" wisecracking about the discouraging and volatile state of their nation.
"The nice thing about socialism," Dr. Siri says at one point, "is that everyone - no matter what their physical or mental state - gets treated equally." But Cotterill amends this: "He didn't bother to add the word 'badly."'
Improbable as it may sound in the midst of death, disappointment, old age and the "16 shades of brown dust" that can be found all over the countryside, Anarchy and Old Dogs has moments of mordant hilarity. For instance Cotterill concocts a wonderful scene in which Dr. Siri and Civilai, who learned to love the cinema in Paris and will still sit through anything shown on a movie screen (even titles like The Benefits of Oiling Your Weapon), attend the politically expedient version of a Bruce Lee film.
At the front of the theater sit three people with scripts. They speak all the dialogue, even in moments when Lee is not moving his lips. Only in this part of the world does Lee taunt a rival this way: "So, it's just you and me. Me, the representative of the honest people of the land. You, a capitalist who would gladly sell the soil beneath our feet to the foreign devils."
The plot of Anarchy and Old Dogs rambles breezily among settings like this theater, the wedding-cake castle of a vanished prince, rural parts of the country where a coroner is paid in fish, and a refugee camp across the Mekhong River in Thailand. It is to this last place that two of Dr. Siri's sidekicks venture to learn more about the counterrevolutionary scheming.
But everywhere Cotterill's characters go, they maintain a wry, seasoned, offhand style that has been the secret weapon of this unexpectedly blithe and charming series. The earlier books, which contribute greatly to the full enjoyment of this one, are The Coroner's Lunch, Thirty-Three Teeth and Disco for the Departed. The irreverence of those titles nicely reflects the books' spirit.
"Look at you," says Siri's plump young nurse, Dtui. "Older than Angkor Wat, up all night boozing, and you still look as frisky as a prawn on a hot plate. What's your secret?" Whatever it is, it gets him through Anarchy and Old Dogs in style. And it leaves him poised for a whole new kind of old dog's adventure.
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