Monday’s bomb blast in Bangkok surprised everyone, even a Bangkok crime writer

Monday's Bangkok explosion surprised a lot of residents in Thailand.

Even those acutely tuned in to crime. Like John Burdett.

He's a crime writer. And his fictional Bangkok detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep cracks cases in the books, Bangkok 8 and the Godfather of Kathmandu.

Burdett splits his time between Thailand and France. He told us that a bombing in Bangkok just doesn't make sense.

"I'm as absolutely baffled as everybody else," he says. "I feel awful," he says.

Burdett says the attack is an attack on the Thai economy.

"That area is where foreigners hang out. It's sort of the ‘downtown-downtown’ of Bangkok. And the Thai economy has been suffering particularly because the fall in tourism — for various reasons. And now an attack like that is just awful."

The Thai government released photos of the person they say placed the bomb at the Erawan Shrine. He looks caucasian. Burdett says the suspect's ethnicity adds a problematic dimension to it. There hasn't been an attack in Bangkok by a foreigner in years. "The last time they had foreigners involved in a bombing was when Iranians blew themselves up by mistake. But they were there to blow-up Israeli diplomats. No one has ever thought that a foreigner would do something like this."

It's telling that Burdett's crime novels detail drug trafficking, sex trafficking, crooked cops — but not terrorism. It speaks to life in Thailand. "You feel amazingly safe in Bangkok," he says. "When you read about the Boston bombings and then the London bombings and the Paris bombings, there's been so many bombings. But in Bangkok … I was feeling pretty safe until this happened."

Burdett contacted his wife, who was in Thailand while he was in France, just after the he heard about the bombing. She told him people are scared. "It's gone beyond the politics of it. It's just a visceral fear that anything can go wrong anytime."