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Guga reading Bangkok Haunts in a Bangkok hotel, originally uploaded by 160507.

My old boss Teddy Boy taught me that the best way to prepare for a trip to a city you don’t know is to read a detective novel or mystery set there: at the very least you get an idea of its topography. Hence Michael Dibdin for Venice and other Italian cities, Andrea Camilleri for Sicily, Georges Simenon for Paris and other French cities, and Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind for Barcelona. Arthur Conan Doyle for London, that’s elementary. For Bangkok I read John Burdett’s Bangkok Haunts, the third of his much-praised series in which the protagonist is half-Thai, half-American policeman Sonchai Jitpleecheep. (I couldn’t find the two earlier books in Manila stores, but I just got the first, Bangkok 8, at Bangkok airport.)

The Thai Buddhist background gives Jitpleecheep and his co-workers a different perspective on crime and human nature. At the start of Bangkok Haunts, a pathologist explains to an American FBI agent why the woman in a snuff movie did not seem terrified at her impending death. Later Sonchai patiently tells the same agent why his partner on the police force, who is not gay, is about to get a sex-change operation. Bangkok Haunts is Brilliant and Riveting, Dark and Sleazy. Let’s just say it won’t reinforce your cheerful view of human nature. Maybe I shouldn’t have read it right before my first trip to Bangkok, but it made the experience more intense.

The book describes something called “the elephant game”, a nasty form of execution used by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The executioners make a bamboo cage in the shape of a large ball, and put the condemned man in it. Then they bring in an elephant and encourage it to play football. The elephant starts kicking the ball, and when it gets annoyed–elephants are irritable–it starts whacking the cage with its trunk. Then it gets bored. Humans are quite fragile.

So I arrive in Bangkok and practically the first thing I see is an elephant.