Fatal Encounters

By Laurence I. Barrett

SERPENTINE by Thomas Thompson Doubleday; 563 pages; $12.95

Jack the Ripper, John Dillinger, Willie Sutton, the Boston Strangler, Charles Gurmukh Sobhraj. Charles who? Does this unknown belong on the list of world-class criminals? After this pounding story of larceny and murder from Hong Kong to Paris, the answer must be yes, and Sobhraj, now in an Indian prison, can serve his ludicrously lenient seven-year sentence with his considerable ego gratified. Serpentine, Thomas Thompson's corpse-by-corpse account of Sobhraj's career, took just a month from publication in October to make the bestseller list and a $1 million movie deal.

Thompson will net far more than the bandit ever grossed, for bad luck usually offset Sobhraj's zeal and cunning. A single exploit in 1971 could make a screenplay. Intending to rob a New Delhi jewelry shop, Sobhraj conned the occupant of a hotel room just above and for two nights tried to break through with drills. When the excavation failed, the thief got his unwilling hostess--an exotic dancer named Markowitz from Brooklyn--to lure the jewel merchant to her room with a sampling of his wares. The gunman pounced. For once he had a big score, jewels worth hundreds of thousands. But his departure was delayed at New Delhi's busy airport; police closed in and Sobhraj lost his loot while escaping.

Misfortune was his companion from conception, which occurred in Saigon during World War II. Papa was an Indian tailor who neglected to wed Mama, a Vietnamese peasant trying to mate her way up the social ladder. She achieved a limited success by marrying a French army officer. For the young Sobhraj, this meant rattling around the world--France, Saigon, France again, Africa, an Indian village, back to France. Along the way he honed his aptitudes for language and larceny.

After some small-time malfeasance in France, Sobhraj moved east again and established a canny modus operandi. He would present himself to tourists as a successful and charming Eurasian businessman. He then slipped his pigeons knockout drops and plucked them of anything that could bring a rupee, a baht, or a Turkish lira.

Occasionally he was caught, but incarceration rarely lasted long. In Kabul he got himself transferred to a prison hospital. Steel handcuffs attached him to the bed and a guard sat near by. Tough situation? Not for Sobhraj. He laced the warder's tea with chloroform and escaped using his set of skeleton keys.

About five years ago, Sobhraj drastically changed his routine. Rather than put his victims to sleep, the glib psychopath began to kill some of them by applying gasoline and a match while they were groggy or comatose. Interpol and national police records show a dozen such murders in Sobhraj's wake, and there were probably more.

One of the oddities in Author Thompson's reconstruction is the lack of a clear explanation of what turned Sobhraj homicidal. Another quirk is the author's insistence upon puffing his rich material into an epic. Early histories of supporting characters, locales far from the action and other miscellany are conveyed in an excess of disorienting detail. Thompson, a writer for LIFE who found additional success between hard covers (Hearts, Blood and Money), seems to have let his reportorial energy overcome his sense of discriminating narrative.

Still, Serpentine should hold readers' attention in coils of intrigue, twists of coincidence, the burlesque failures of police in seven countries, the grit of a few civilians outraged enough to play vigilante and the final caper that trips the outlaw. If the book has a message it is that travelers should avoid more than the water in places like Delhi, Bangkok, Kabul and Katmandu.--Laurence I. Barrett

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