Discovering a Laotian Sleuth

Dr. Siri Paiboun, the protagonist of Colin Cotterill's December Book Sense Pick debut suspense novel The Coroner's Lunch (Soho Press), is a most unlikely series hero: a 77-year-old Paris-trained physician serving as reluctant coroner to the Communist Pathet Lao regime in Laos in 1976.

And, as it happens, the peripatetic man who conceived of Dr. Siri is a somewhat unlikely author.

Cotterill, 52, was not a great book-reader as a child. Born near Wimbledon, England, he mostly liked comics as a youngster, he said recently, by telephone from his apartment in Thailand: "Buster, Beano, Dandy; and then I progressed to the American Marvel comics: Captain America, that kind of thing."

Colin Cotterill

After graduating from teacher's-training college, he went to Melbourne, Australia, in 1976, and taught primary school. In Perth, Cotterill found himself working with refugees: boat people from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Burma. "It sparked my interest to get involved," he said, " to visit the countries and find out why these people all left. So that was the connection, between me and Southeast Asia. Around '79, I left for my big world trip -- the trip that didn't ever stop."

The future author held a number of jobs during his ongoing odyssey. In the early '80s, he taught for a couple of years at a university in Kanagawa, Japan. In 1986, he said, he first went to Thailand, where he made friends and contacts he has kept to this day.

In Bangkok, Cotterill worked for the television department of an open university, where, despite his lack of experience, he wrote, directed, edited, and appeared in the nationally broadcast English by Accident, a "40-program situation comedy series that slowly taught English."

The TV series led to a job with UNESCO, which took him to Laos for the first time in 1990. There, Cotterill established a video library and training program and made more lifetime friends.

Back in Thailand, around 1995, he became involved ("I suppose by accident") in child-protection work. "That was mainly because one of the teachers at our college, an Englishman, was quite well-known on the island for messing around with little kids. And so we set up this organization, partly to get him arrested, but also to try and sort out the mess that was happening on Phuqet. I got involved full-time with child-protection; I went to study [it] for a year in Australia, came back to Thailand, and I've been doing that ever since."

A few years ago, though, he took what he thought would be a one-year leave of absence in order to write about his Phuqet experiences. Cotterill (who'd earlier done some articles and cartoons) produced a novel and two other books about child-protection, which were published in English in Thailand. "It's not a very big English-language audience in Thailand," Cotterill admitted. But positive feedback from that first novel encouraged him to continue his fiction efforts.

Having written what had threatened to become an overly depressing book about his work in child-protection, Cotterill purposely kept things lighter when writing what became The Coroner's Lunch.

"I had this love relationship with the country of Laos," he said. "I was there four years, I have very close friends there. I keep going back. There's so much there, and it's never been written about. When Laos is mentioned, it's as a side theater to the Vietnam War. You don't very often get to find what the people are like. And I wanted to put my people into a book."

For the characters and events in his period novel, Cotterill drew on memories of listening to Laotian acquaintances. "I've spent a lot of time sitting around with people who lived through that period," he said, "both people who were in the jungles and in the caves with the communists; and people who were in Vientiane, fearing the communists. All sitting around together, talking about things like this. We spent many long nights, telling stories.

"When you get a communist and a noncommunist sitting down together discussing those days, it's very amicable; there doesn't seem to be any aggression. These are two people who were forced to be enemies, I suppose, by foreign aggression. The Laos are very much victims of history.

"Laos I don't think is a typical anything, really. It wasn't a typical communist takeover, and it wasn't a typical colony. It doesn't seem to follow the rules of other countries; it has its own style of doing things."

And Cotterill's protagonist, the estimable Dr. Siri (based, the author said, on three different real-life individuals) is hardly a typical thriller hero.

"I like to write about people who are not anti-heroes exactly," explained Cotterill, "but who are trapped into a situation that they have to adapt to. And I really wanted to have a central character who was getting on a bit [in age]. There are so few stories based around a person of that age; they're being wasted!"

Asked if he shares characteristics with his protagonist, Cotterill said with a laugh, "I think perhaps the fact that he goes into a situation not really confident that he can do it, and then finds a way to adapt to that situation. I put myself into such projects quite often -- like the child-protection work.… I think I'm the kind of person who can get it together after a little while and say, okay, well, I'm in this situation above my head, and I don't really know what to do, so I'm going to make an effort to learn."

He did that with The Coroner's Lunch. Cotterill ended up writing a sophisticated suspense novel with spiritual, historical, and political overtones. Once it was done, he sent queries and a sample chapter to all the New York agents he could find e-mail addresses for. Richard Curtis responded with an agency contract and placed the book with Soho. By then, Cotterill was well into the writing of a second Dr. Siri adventure. That book, too, is scheduled for SOHO publication. Now Cotterill has completed a third.

Yet this youthful-looking, late-blooming author -- now that he's demonstrated his gift -- can imagine putting fiction aside sometime, maybe even in the very near future.

"Writing's a very lonely thing," Cotterill said. "This last two years, I've been stuck here in my little apartment, writing -- leaving the world, step by step, slowly. I want to get back into it again. So it depends, I suppose, on the reaction to the books I've done already. And whether or not I can have a real life while I'm doing this."

He still has other things he wants to do besides write books. "I do a lot of cartooning," Cotterill said. "I'd like to do a political cartoon strip on a regular basis, for a national newspaper. I'd like to be able to set up my own NGO [non-government organization] that'll fend for the street kids." And Cotterill soon hopes to start a program to get Lao-language books into the hands of Laotian schoolchildren. "In schools [in Laos], there are so few books that the kids have to share. It's as if books are unknown to a whole generation."

Worthy goals, all. In the meantime, Colin Cotterill is throwing himself into yet another new experience: a mini-tour of American independent bookstores that will take him in January to such distant-from-Thailand cities as Phoenix, Arizona, and San Mateo, California.

"It's a bit of fun," he said, of his impromptu U.S. junket. "I can't imagine doing this again." --Tom Nolan