Inspector Maigret as a Communist Coroner

Kasey Cox

Every few months, the BookSense/IndieBound program of the ABA (a national association of independent booksellers) compiles a great newsletter of recommendations specifically for book club reading. These suggestions come from real people who read books, buy books, and talk with other people who love books – not just from spin doctors at publishing houses or corporate offices who get paid to tell you how great a book is. Long before the bookstore here in Wellsboro was even a glimmer in my eye, I loved picking up these BookSense newsletters at “indie” stores wherever my travels took me. Even now, at our monthly book club at the store, we spend almost as much time discussing the current month’s book as we do pouring over these newsletters, tasting various titles, reading recommendations out loud, taking our delicious time deciding what we might read in future months together.

Surprisingly, the book for June was a mystery (there actually aren’t a lot of those that make the recommendation list) and I didn’t choose it (I have, as regular Gazette readers may have seen of late, reacquired my taste for mysteries, especially the “cozy” mysteries which I blather on about quite often). Truth be told, upon reading the description of The Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotterill, I was less than excited to read it. Though I do often enjoy historical fiction, I have to admit that I’m a reluctant reader of things set in Southeast Asia. This is one area where my WASP-y bias shows, but for me, even Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham are steeped in a language, culture and political climate that is too murky to understand, let alone the voices of the native writers from that part of the world. Nevertheless, I’m in a book club to push myself to try books I might not have chosen on my own, so I plunged ahead.

Opening in Vietiane, Laos in 1976, not long after we Americans took our last helicopters out of Saigon, 72-year-old Dr. Siri Paiboun has just been appointed the national coroner for the new People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. Having joined the Communist Party many years before, mostly to please his more politically-focused wife, Dr. Siri had been looking forward to retirement, and has never performed an autopsy in his entire career as a physician. Working under an inexperienced, Party-line, power-drunk magistrate, with next to nothing in the way of facilities or materials, Dr. Siri feels only a listless interest in his life. Luckily, he gets on well with his small staff, the nurse Dtui who secretly reads fashion magazines and longs to study abroad, and the former coroner’s assistant, Mr. Geung, a man with Down’s Syndrome who nonetheless has a penchant for remembering rote procedures which Dr. Siri never had a chance to learn.

Indeed, the real strength of this novel is the wonderfully alive, quirky characters with all their eccentricities, struggling to adjust to life under a new regime. Our book club really enjoyed Siri’s observation that, although he himself was “a heathen of a Communist”, most didn’t complain about life under a government which was still corrupt, and still abusive of many of the common people, since at least now the Laotians were doing it to their own people, instead of the decades of abuse at the hand of outsiders. Moments of comic relief are provided in regular conversations near the Mekhong River between Siri and his friend “Older Brother Civilai” (born just two days before Siri), who is a “big nob” in the Party yet has somehow retained his sense of irony. There’s a little romance with Auntie Lah, the breadmaker who always makes special sandwiches for Siri; intrigue with the possible murder of an important Party member’s wife; and the mystery of three Vietnamese men found weighted on the bottom of the Nam Ngum Reservoir, apparently tortured.

Inspired by the Inspector Maigret novels Siri enjoyed in Paris as a young medical student, and nudged by his lifelong experience of seeing the dead in his dreams, Siri begins to take pleasure in his job. He allows his intelligence, his curiosity, and his disdain for the bureaucratic red tape pull him deeper into investigations which many people preferred to leave open-and-shut cases. This adventure leads him to consult with Hmong shaman, a Vietnamese detective, a Laotian professor with an Australian husband and child, roughly translated French textbooks, and dead people.

What began for me as a reluctant read ended in with a thriller I couldn’t put down as I followed the nail-biting saga of the “thrice not dead” and clever Dr. Siri. In sure-handed writing, Colin Cotterill has given us a warm, wonderful cast of characters, a subtle and rich setting, and a new series to watch. In the end, I am pleased to report that I am just as excited as the rest of the book club, and the folks who wrote the newsletter reviews, to move right ahead with the following books, Thirty-Three Teeth, Disco for the Departed, and Anarchy and Old Dogs. If you’re looking for “something completely different” in the fiction genre, this is your summer read!