Colin Cotterill "The Woman Who Wouldn't Die"

Three months into his retirement the former national coroner of Laos still isn’t free of the demands on his time resulting from his former status, and one suspects further episodes in this quite wonderful series are going to depend on the number of ways author Colin Cotterill can find to have Dr. Siri Paiboun conscripted into some scheme that might or might not be in the national interest but will certainly have some impact on some high-ranking official’s peace of mind.

This time around a clairvoyant has told the Minister of Agriculture she can locate the remains of his long-lost dead brother, presumed killed in a covert military operation organizing guerrilla attacks on royalist held bases. According to the Minister’s Vietnamese wife his brother’s spirit is restless, and according to the psychic the remains are located in a sunken boat on a bend of the Mekhong, not far from the village of Pak Lai.

Predictably, the minister assembles a team to get the bones back and will, of course, need a pathologist to verify the identity of the bones once they’ve been excavated. Dr. Siri might have retired, but he’s still the only man who can do the job, and this time, given the psychic element, he’s interested in going.

The clairvoyant, the widow of a rich royalist who had dealings with Vietnamese interests and connections to the Lao hierarchy had been on a trip to Vietnam to pursue her business interests, returned home and was murdered in her bed by an alleged burglar. Her neighbours took her body and cremated it, but three days later she was back, large as life having picked up the ability to communicate with the dead while she was away though she had managed to pick up a slight Vietnamese accent along the way. The village was convinced she was a witch returned from the dead. Before long there’s a steady stream of visitors passing through the village, looking to contact their dead relatives, which is what brought the minister and his wife into orbit around her.

Those of us who’ve been aboard for a while know Dr Siri, while he’s an educated, rational man of science, happens to be hosting the spirit of a thousand-year-old shaman and while he’s subsequently able to see the ghosts of the dead hosting the spirit of Yeh Ming doesn’t automatically deliver the ability to understand what the spirits are saying to him. Under those circumstances the opportunity to consult with someone who might be able to clear the channels of supernatural communication is something he’s obviously going to take.

Under other circumstances, of course, Siri would be quite happy to sit back and enjoy life and noodles with his wife, Madame Daeng, he proprietor of the best noodle shop in Vientiane, and the rest of the regular cast, but since he’s been called away on this junket he’s going to include them all on the junket, isn’t he?

There’s another factor in the decision to get out of town and take a couple of his acolytes with him. A tall, handsome, elderly Frenchman arrives in Vientiane and starts asking after Madame Daeng’s whereabouts. It’s obvious he’s planning to kill her and settle an old score (and the fact that he’s suffering from terminal cancer adds a degree of urgency). That dovetails nicely with another strand of the plot line.

With Siri’s encouragement, she’s writing her memoirs, which, predictably, are largely concerned with the role she played in the postwar for struggle for independence from the French and while we learn that Madame Daeng was attracted to Siri from the moment she first saw him many years ago the really interesting part of the story is her career as a sort of Laotian Mata Hari, uncovering French secrets and killing her share of French officials  along the way. That wasn’t only prompted by nationalist sentiments, there’s a wrong that needs to be righted in the form of a terrible injustice a pair of Frenchmen had visited on her sister.

So off they head on their little junket, Siri, Madame Daeng, his former morgue attendant Geung and, predictably, Civilai, temporarily out of retirement on political matters along with the clairvoyant, who’s a little too attractive for Madame Daeng’s liking. They’ve left Nurse Dtui and Inspector Phosy behind in Vientiane, which is handy because someone needs to investigate the clairvoyant’s background.

And, as far as clairvoyants are concerned, when it’s all over and the mystery has been solved, they’re back in Vientiane for the party to celebrate transvestite fortune teller Auntie Bpoo’s impending death, an occasion that allows Phosy, Madame Daeng and, of course, Siri to explain the finer points of the solution over Cabernet Sauvignon and Champagne.

I had, leading up to The Woman Who Wouldn't Die been harbouring the suspicion that Cotterill had taken Dr Siri about as far as the characters and their circumstances would allow, but there are a couple of touches that turn up herein that suggest there’s a fair bit of life left in the series as long as the author can come up with a plot scenario that works. If he’s looking for a starting point, of course, there’s always Siri’s ongoing tussle with the housing authorities regarding the number of people living in his house, an issue that produces an interesting solution that helps out the investigation here.

On that basis, after initial misgivings, I’m inclined to see the emergence of Cotterill’s other series, the Jimm Juree stories, as an undoubted good thing. This interview with Cotterill suggests he was starting to get a little formulaic with the Dr Siri tales, and needed the new series to keep things fresh. On the strength of this latest title, which is as good as anything that’s gone before, I’d agree.

Colin Cotterill "Slash and Burn"

Having finished the eighth title in Colin Cotterill’s Dr Siri series, one can’t help feeling the Slash and Burn in the title is reflected in an authorial desire to move on to fresh ground, in much the same way as practitioners of shifting agriculture are forced to when their current patch starts to run out of nutritional steam.

Having noted the existence of a new Cotterill series (Jimm Juree as the protagonist, two titles, Killed At The Whim Of A Hat and Granddad, There's a Head on the Beach to date) and the near death experience in Siri #7 (Love Songs From a Shallow Grave) it seemed safe to assume that we’d reached the end of the road as far at the National Coroner of the People’s Republic of Laos was concerned, but here we are with an eighth title and the possibility of intermittent episodes to come, a possibility that came to pass with the appearance of The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die at the start of this year.

Cotterill had, in other words wound things up, but left the way open for a sequel since, while Dr Siri Paiboun is looking down the barrel of a ninth decade (he’s pushing eighty, and is still, however reluctantly in the work force) and might be on the verge of actually retiring, there’s always the possibility his services might be needed (purely on an ad hoc basis, you understand) in the future.

This time around, with the paperwork relating to actual retirement lodged and apparently accepted, Dr Siri might be looking forward to retirement, coffee mornings overlooking the Mekhong, leisurely noodle lunches at his wife Daeng’s shop, long evenings of talking rice whisky nonsense with ex-politburo man Civilai, and nights stretched out against a triangular pillow in his illicit back room library reading French literature and philosophy, but he’s asked to undertake one last assignment.

In 1968 Capt. Boyd Bowry, son of a U.S. senator, went Missing In Action, presumed dead after the helicopter he was piloting exploded over a remote jungle village in northern Laos. With the American involvement in Indochina over, they’ve turned their attention to the servicemen registered as MIA, and given Bowry’s parentage, his disappearance is going to be given a higher priority than might otherwise be the case.

Having appointed Dr. Siri’s nemesis Judge Haeng to head the Lao contingent in the investigation, you and I might suspect Siri is the last person Haeng would want included in the excursion, but the Americans know there’s a National Coroner and have asked for him by name.

Seizing the opportunity, Dr Siri engages in a bit of coercion (well, blackmail really) to have his wife and his regular crowd of cronies included in what looks to be a preretirement junket, which is how he manages to get Nurse Dtui and Mr. Geung, Dtui’s husband Inspector Phosy, ex-Politburo member Civilai and transvestite/fortune-teller Auntie Bpoo in on the action, joining a number of colourful Americans including the pompous US senator complete with white suit who’s there for the photo opportunity when they find the body, a a loudmouthed heavy-drinking ex-serviceman with a dodgy past.

Since Siri speaks little English he’ll need an interpreter, which explains Auntie Bpoo, and since American need one of their own we get a highly attractive girl named Peach, born in Laos to an American missionary couple, a Lao heart “forced to live in this big awkward farang body” (her words) with a sense of humour and looks guaranteed to break vast numbers of hearts with Judge Haeng being an obvious starter in that department.

They’re off to the Friendship Hotel, a remote location on the Plain of Jars, with the Americans supplying transportation and prepackaged meals, and the location, a decrepit building in the middle of a field of unexploded ordinance raises issues involving the carpet bombing of Laos during the Vietnam war era.

That’s only a starting point, however. Other issues that turn out to have some bearing on the case include covert American operations during the seventies, the discovery of gold around the same time, and the legacy the war has left on the landscape, in the villages of Laos and on the minds of the citizens, who are out for whatever they can wangle out of the MIA caper. One of Dr Siri’s first tasks is to find a way to cut down on the vast number of false claims by his opportunistic compatriots who claim to have material that might be connected to a MIA case and are only too happy to sell.

Once that’s out of the way a couple of complications set in. First up, cross-dressing fortune-teller Auntie Bpoo advises Dr Siri that his days are numbered and the count is down to the fingers of one hand. Then, a member of the party is found dead, which begins a train of events that don’t seem to be entirely accidental.

Smoke from local fires obscures the countryside, which would be fine a few months further down the track, when it would probably be the smoke from locals practising slash and burn agriculture and clearing new patches of ground to farm, but they don’t do that sort of thing at this time of year. Dr. Siri is sure something is going on, and the poor visibility is probably a deliberate smoke screen. Communications with the outside world go down, the group is forced to stay to the point where the prepackaged rations run out, Madame Daeng takes over the catering and as everyone pursues their own agendas mysterious events in the Philippines suggest things are even more complicated than they seem.

Predictably, Siri eventually makes sense of the situation, announces what happened to the pilot and unmasks the murderer within the group, which is, ironically, not the actual point of the story or the series from where I’m sitting. The whole series is increasingly looking like an opportunity for Cotterill to engage in a little sardonic comment through his Laotian mouthpiece on the horrors inflicted on a small country that would have been quite happy to mind its own business but has been forced to suffer as the major powers manipulate events within and outside its borders in the nominal cause of a fight for freedom.

Dona Leon’s Brunetti series provide her with an avenue to write about corruption and related issues in Italy in general and Venice in particular, and I’m leaning towards a belief that Cotterill is engaged in a similar exercise with his humble and wonderfully humane protagonist. Last time around the Khmer Rouge, this time CIA involvement in the remoter corners of Laos. It’ll be interesting to see what he comes up with next...