'Your writing enemy'

 "'Shun security,' I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck.  'Get disoriented.'  Maybe your agonizing writing block isn't agonizing enough.  Your enemy is comfort." - John Burdett

Born in London in July of 1951, Burdett is a former lawyer who lived and worked in Hong Kong for 12 years where he started writing, producing the sensational first novel, The Last Six Million Seconds, a murder mystery set in 1997 Hong Kong. 

 

Burdett never really wanted to be a lawyer.  He actually studied English and American Literature at Warwick University where he specialized in the unique combination of Shakespeare and metaphysical poetry.  But, out of despair during the British economic and political crises of the 1970s, he switched to Law.  

 

But, the draw of writing was too great and he abandoned law to pursue a career as a novelist, given a great setting and time – when Hong Kong was being transferred from Great Britain to China – to write  that first bestseller.  His most recent book Death Effect, features an unlikely partnership between a bumbling sheriff and a principled medical examiner in rural Alabama.  Despite setting his first book in Hong Kong and most recent in the U.S., many of his works are set in Thailand.

 “In essence, the Thai people are not materialistic at all. They're not in the least driven by the kind of ambition that drives us. The more I got to know them, and the more time I spent with them, the more I understood that this was a totally legitimate attitude to life, and why not?"