Mindfulness and murder

Written by changthai11 on Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Bangkok resident releases third in series of murder mysteries featuring a crime-solving Buddhist monk

USNISA SUKHSVASTI

There’s more to the Bangkok fiction scene than the latest chapter in “My Adventures with Bar Girls” - but you’re going to have dig a little deeper to find it.

Silkworm Books in Chiang Mai, known for the quality and integrity of their numerous non-fiction titles, recently began publishing a series of detective novels featuring a Buddhist monk, Father Ananda, who was once a policeman, and his sidekick, a temple boy named Jak. The murder mysteries are by the Bangkok Post’s own Nick Wilgus, who is the chief sub-editor of the “Outlook” section and who has lived in Thailand since 1993.

This month brings the release of the third novel in the series, Killer Karma, in which Father Ananda and Jak travel to a seaside monastery famed for its reported “ghost” sightings. Are the ghosts real, or is it just a hoax? That’s what Father Ananda has been asked to find out. But nothing is quite what it seems at the monastery and Father Ananda and Jak have a hard time getting to the bottom of things.

The first two books in the series were Mindfulness and Murder and Garden of Hell. They have been translated into French, German, Italian and Spanish, with discussions underway for Swedish and Russian versions. An American publisher is also being sought. The foreign language versions are selling well in their respective countries, though sales in Thailand have been “disappointing”, Wilgus says.

“Bangkok fiction has such a bad rap - and so much of it is crap, anyway. How many books about bars and girls can you stomach? In a country as rich in culture and history as Thailand, they can’t find anything else to write about?”

Even though Silkworm Books doesn’t normally publish fiction, Wilgus says he deliberately sought them out, on the advice of a friend, because of their reputation for quality and fact-checking.

“I knew my books would be subjected to intense scrutiny and anything that wasn’t up to par would be challenged - which is exactly what happened. They insisted on cultural accuracy, right down to the smallest details. That makes me feel better because I’m a farang trying to write from the perspective of a Thai Buddhist monk - a bit arrogant, if you think about it. At least I know that I’m getting the details correct, even if Father Ananda does seem a bit too Western in his thinking.”

So why a series of books about a Buddhist monk?

“I’ve always been fascinated by religion,” Wilgus explains. “Why do people do what they do? Why do they believe what they believe? It’s always fascinated me. And one day, I had this image in my head of a Buddhist monk going to the communal bathroom in the morning and finding a dead body there. And since he is a former police officer, his curiosity kicks in. What’s going on here? The police aren’t too helpful. And from there, the first book came to life.

“I also wanted to convey some of the things I had learned about Thailand, often the hard way - how different the culture is, how different the thinking is, how completely alien it can seem to an outsider like me. I wanted to try to get into that and talk about that.”

Wilgus is a prolific writer, but part of it is due, ironically, to a personal condition - a bipolar disorder - that is not alien to a lot of well-known writers, from Silvia Plath and Virginia Woolf to Moss Hart. Wilgus has struggled with it, yet admits it is this that helped him complete his first book in a record two weeks.

“That’s true,” he says, smiling ruefully. “But you have to understand. I didn’t know that I was bipolar then. Back then I was on an incredible manic high and I whipped that book out in two weeks, writing day and night. I wrote six books that year, actually. But then I crashed and burned and eventually I was diagnosed with bipolar, so I started taking medication to control it. Which it does. But it also makes me slow. I can’t write as fast as I used to. My brain just isn’t clicking as fast as it did. It’s like molasses dripping down a maple tree in the middle of a Michigan winter. Sometimes I think I’m not much better than a vegetable.

“Even so, I got used to the medications and after a while I could start writing again, although a lot more slowly. Killer Karma took me about eight months to write. It was very slow and plodding. But when I compare it to the other things I’ve written, it’s no better, no worse.

“It’s not Shakespeare - it’s not meant to be. I prefer short books. Who has the time for all 1,350 pages of War and Peace? Some of these books today, they go on and on and on, 800 pages, 1,000 pages or more. Only a few merit that much space. No, I prefer shorter books. I like to get right to the point. I don’t want a 12-page description of marigolds. And I don’t want plots that are so complicated and involve so many characters that you can’t keep track of what’s happening. So that’s the kind of books I write, shorter books, like Agatha Christie mysteries or Albert Camus’s The Outsider. I think they call them ‘tea cosies’. Something to read with your afternoon tea. More perplexing than gruesome.”

Wilgus has also been published in America, his country of origin. He wrote Bilal’s Bread and Adventures of the Bird-Shit Foreigner, both published by Alyson Books.

“Someone once described [Mindfulness and Murder] as a ‘good beach read’ - and that’s fine with me. I have no literary pretensions. I’m glad that people enjoy my books and as long as people keep reading them, I’ll keep writing them.”