Anyone heading for post tsunami Thailand this summer looking for reassurance that business is back to normal need look no further than Bangkok Tattoo (Bantam, £12.99; offer £10.39) for evidence that in the capital at least it never went away.

John Burdett’s brothel-keeping Buddhist detective introduced in the equally enthralling Bangkok 8 (Corgi), now in paperback, is on the trail of the killers of a call-girl-besotted CIA man found murdered, castrated and flayed.

Malay-influenced Muslim separatists and the internecine feud between the corrupt police chief and a drug-dealing general combine with oriental pragmatism, karma consciousness and the sex trade to make a cracking exotic read.

Back home, Robert Goddard’s Sight Unseen (Bantam, £16.99; offer £13.59) ventures no farther afield than Wiltshire and Jersey in a typically taut tale of wrecked lives, family tragedy, historical quirks and moral consequences. The witness to the abduction of one child and death of another is revisited by a retired detective who has had an obscure anonymous tip-off in the words of an 18th-century essayist.

Lee Child’s The Enemy (Bantam, £6.99; offer £5.94) delves into the past of his tough-guy drifter Jack Reacher. This excursion into Reacher’s crime-solving origins as a military policeman is not as satisfying as might have been expected but is a must for his fans.

A more remarkable revival is that of Arkady Renko in Martin Cruz Smith’s magnificent Wolves Eat Dogs (Macmillan, £17.99; offer £14.39). The hero of Gorky Park penetrates the dark heart of the total exclusion zone around Chernobyl to find a curious idyll of the damned, a toxic paradise inhabited by the old, the sick, mutating wildlife and murderous black marketeers.

In a very different rural idyll Jim Kelly paints a dark side to the Cambridgeshire fens. In The Fire Baby Detective Jim Dryden investigated a murder concealed for nearly three decades by the only survivor of a plane crash. In The Moon Tunnel (Michael Joseph, £10.99; offer £8.79) he finds an equally bizarre web of murderous intrigue lurking in an abandoned prisoner-of-war camp when a body is found in an old escape tunnel — trying to break in — and then another, more recent, corpse is unearthed.

But for me the publishing event of the summer is an old story, or rather half a dozen old stories. Penguin have re-released all Raymond Chandler’s inimitable — though much imitated — Philip Marlowe books (£7.99-£8.99; offer £6.79-£7.64), with new introductions from the likes of Ian Rankin and Colin Dexter.

It’s almost impossible to read these without lapsing into a Humphrey Bogart accent, even though Bogey played Marlowe in only one movie, The Big Sleep. The story is that when the director rang Chandler to ask who killed the guy found in the car off the end of the pier, he couldn’t remember. Small wonder — you won’t find out by reading the book. But the pace, dialogue, bleak subtropical LA atmosphere and sharp characterisation defined “noir ” and still do.

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