Stories about the only coroner in Laos in the early days of the communist takeover on the 1970s don’t sound as though they hold out much hope for light-hearted humour, yet Colin Cotterill manages to find it in this series published by Quercus, a publishing house based in London’s Bloomsbury Square, the heart of the literary establishment. Cotterill takes the unpromising raw material and turns it into a series of detective stories to rival, or often surpass, Alexander McCall Smith’s African detective stories.
Dr Siri Paiboun - Laotian National Coroner
Colin Cotterill’s unlikely hero is Dr Siri Paiboun, a septuagenarian of no exact age whose early childhood was spent with a wicked aunt before he was rescued from Laos in 1921 and sent to Paris by rich sponsor to study medicine. Paris at that time was, of course, a hot-bed of revolutionary through and Siri joined the Communist Party, as he puts it, ‘for a lark’ before returning to Laos just before the outbreak of World War 2.
Following a long period repairing broken soldiers in the jungle warfare during the various South-East Asian wars between 1940 and 1975, Siri is appointed National Coroner to the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, indeed he is the country’s only coroner. Assisted only by his trusty Nurse, Dtui, his equally trusty Mortuary Attendant, Geung, and a strong dose of good-humoured spirit assistance (not the sort of spirit to come out of a bottle), Dr Paiboun addresses a series of mysteries which would have tested Sherlock Holmes.
The Dr Siri Series
To date, Colin Cotterill has written five books in the Dr Siri, Loatian Coroner, series:
- The Coroner’s Lunch
- Thirty-Three Teeth
- Disco for the Departed
- Anarchy and Old Dogs
- Curse of the Pogo Stick
A sixth book, The Merry Misogynist, is due to be released in 2009.
The books offer a tremendous read being fast-paced, well-crafted and written and with just the right amount of humour to offset the potentially very dark setting in which the stories are placed. The words ‘humour’, mortuary’ and ‘South East Asian Communist regime’ do not sit well with each other in many other writers’ work. Cotterill, however, manages to achieve a first by doing it and doing it well.
Colin Cotterill - A Short Biography
Colin Cotterill was born in London in 1952 and trained as a teacher, going on to spend a number of years in Laos and Thailand and has set up a charity to help prevent the trafficking of children in the region and continues to work to support children and the training of Laotian teachers. He lives on the Gulf of Siam.
A Short Appreciation of Colin Cotterill's Dr Siri Series
Cotterill’s deep knowledge of the region comes through in his books, as does his recognition of the Kafkaesque side of bureaucratic socialism, the crazy side of officialdom. and the inherent desire of the bulk of all populations to just get on with living despite the ideological beliefs of those who rule over them. For those who like their realism tinged with a sceptical humour, Collin Cotterill’s Dr SIri series is just the job.
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