Bodies of Work

Colin Cotterill owes a lot to hepatitis. In 1990, as an aid worker for UNESCO, he was dispatched to Laos to develop a curriculum for English classes. It was a bit of a Sisyphean assignment, since all the English textbooks in the country were written in German, a language virtually no one in Laos understood. On the flight from Europe, however, fate intervened. A doctor in the adjacent seat leaned over. "He said, 'You do realize you have hepatitis, don't you?'" Cotterill recalls. "I looked at myself in the mirror, and, by God, there were these big yellow tennis-ball eyes staring back at me."

Cotterill spent his first month in Laos in a hospital, where he quickly befriended the medical staff. He liked them so much, in fact, that after he recuperated, he took an apartment above the place. While living there, he got a first-hand look at the shocking dilapidation of the country's medical infrastructure. Years later, the experience would provide the inspiration for a series of charmingly offbeat mystery novels set in Laos and featuring a most unlikely detective: Dr. Siri Paiboun, the country's chief — and only — coroner.

Dr. Siri certainly isn't your average gumshoe. For one thing, he's in his mid-70s, and feeling the weight of his years. But he does have a few advantages. He's able to commune with the spirits of the cadavers that pass through his morgue — "customers," as he calls them with characteristically mordant humor. And Dr. Siri is a cynic, naturally distrustful of the political cant mouthed by his communist-party superiors.

The fifth and latest Dr. Siri mystery, Curse of the Pogo Stick, is set in 1976, shortly after the communist takeover of Laos, and revolution is still very much in the air. The doctor, a former Pathet Lao guerilla who happens to have studied medicine in Paris, has been pressed, with much grumbling, into service as a coroner. Politics rudely intrudes when a body arrives in his morgue booby-trapped with a live grenade. Dr. Siri soon finds himself untangling a mystery involving Hmong insurgents, a possible demonic possession, and a plot by a female terrorist known as the Lizard, who plays Moriarty to his Holmes. As in the previous Dr. Siri books, the plot is mostly a pretext for a leisurely stroll through Laos' history and profoundly rooted religious traditions, and it's this that gives Pogo Stick a certain charm, even if it doesn't always satisfy as a mystery.

Originally a Londoner, Cotterill was working as an English teacher in Australia when he first became interested in Laos — meeting refugees who had fled the communist takeover. One man in particular, a former Cabinet minister in the royalist government, later suggested a model for Dr. Siri. "They were more than cynical," Cotterill says of the émigrés. "They were really angry to be forced to leave what was then a good life. They'd saved money, had careers and sent their children to good schools. Then the communists moved in and suddenly this lifestyle was taken from them."

Cotterill spent about four years in Laos (he now lives in Thailand). Although he quickly grew to love its unhurried rhythms and the unfailing good humor of its people, he didn't set out to write about it. Instead, his first stab at fiction produced a dense, depressing investigation of child sex-trafficking in Asia, an issue Cotterill has also delved into as an NGO worker. That novel sold "about two copies," Cotterill says. He realized a lighter touch might prove more palatable to readers.

In researching his first Dr. Siri mystery, 2004's The Coroner's Lunch, Cotterill had little to go on. Historical accounts from the mid-1970s proved sketchy at best (and, as it happened, Laos had no actual chief coroner to consult). In writing about Laos' most politically tumultuous decade, Cotterill was thus left to fill in the blanks for himself. The latest Dr. Siri mystery, in particular, delves into the tragic history of the Hmong, an ethnic minority buffeted by the Vietnam War and later brutally oppressed in both Vietnam and Laos. "The problem with writing about Laos is information stops about 1978," Cotterill says. "There were a lot of things I wanted to say about the situation of the Hmong, but I'd reached this black hole." Filling that hole should provide Cotterill — and, of course, Dr. Siri — with many more years of detective work.