The Fade-Out, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and DBB meets Repairman Jack

1) The Fade-Out, Act One, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Terrific, atmospheric, shadow-drenched art, and a story that's noir at its helpless, claustrophobic, desperate, Goodis-like best. Like Scalped, its only rival as the best noir comic I've read. The Fade-Out is peppered with tributes to the genre its creators love so well. A movie-studio mogul has the same last name as The Maltese Falcon's Floyd Thursby, and if The Fade-Out's perky, bespectacled studio publicity girl, Dottie Quinn, is not a tribute to Dorothy Malone's bookstore owner in The Big Sleep, I deserve to spend the rest of my life scraping black paint off bogus falcons.

2) The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, attributed to Luo Guanzhong. This massive Chinese classic is both a swashbuckling adventure story and a handy introduction to the tumultuous Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history that attended the decline of the Han dynasty (Think of it as Western Europe from the break-up of the Roman Empire to the emergence of national states.)  It's also a fascinating lesson in the mercurial nature of political alliances, and thus it may make one contemplate the messy nature of state-formation. No wonder it has been a classic for 500 years or more.

F. Paul Wilson

3) Quick Fixes: Tales of Repairman Jack, by F. Paul Wilson. This collection of short stories is my first experience with Wilson's urban fixer Repairman Jack.  Wilson's introduction goes out of its way to say Jack "is not a vigilante, not a do-gooder. He's not out to right wrongs. Nor is he out to change the world or fight crime."  So what is a reader to think when, within the first two stories, Jack defends a small businessman against a manipulative drug dealer, beats the crap out of a gangster, and returns a woman's engagement ring that a thug had taken from her? ("She clutched the tiny ring against her with both hands and began to cry.")

Jack is, in those stories at least, manifestly everything that Wilson insists he is not, except that he takes payment for his work.  If Batman is like a gentleman athlete from the amateur-era Olympics, Repairman Jack is a modern-day, professional Olympian. But his goals are exactly the same as Batman's. (His methods can be harsher, reminiscent of Andrew Vachss' Burke. And Vachss, in fact, has said nice things about Repairman Jack.)

4) Oh, and before I forget, Dietrich Kalteis' Off the Cuff blog is back with a discussion among three authors talking about how they deal with rejection. He illustrates this discussion with one of my nourish shots (above/left). I have no idea if the unknown cyclist was an author whose manuscript had just been rejected.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Table 35: More from the Edgar Awards

More news from Thursday's Edgar Awards dinner, meat, potatoes, and prizes courtesy of the Mystery Writers of America:

1. I sat at the Soho table again this year, which meant I renewed acquaintances with the affable Ed Lin, whom I'd met previously at Bouchercon 2012 in Cleveland. Back then I'd been interested to learn that he has a novel set in Taiwan upcoming from Soho. This time, talk turned to his three novels set in New York's Chinatown around 1975. Lin said he chose that period because of turbulent events of the time on the Chinese mainland and in Taiwan, with old leaders dead or dying, and the Cultural Revolution drawing to an end.  What does that have to do with a troubled Chinese-American Vietnam vet cop in New York? I don't know, but I'm eager to find out. The novels are This is a Bust, Snakes Can't Run, and One Red Bastard.
2. Dennis Lehane, whose Live By Night won the best-novel Edgar, drew appreciative nods and murmurs for expressing his gratitude to bookstores. He also thanked libraries for putting books into the hands of "a kid from the wrong side of the tracks" free of charge.
3. Ken Follett, named a grand master along with Margaret Maron, displayed an enthusiasm for his work that made me think it must be great fun to write massively successful international thrillers. I haven't read Follett, but I may do so now. And that's what I like best about conventions and other crime-fiction events: Meeting, talking with, or just hearing new (or new to me) authors and, because of those meetings, getting excited about reading their work.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Detectives Beyond Borders Night at the Movies

Remember when the family would gather round the television set for Saturday Night at the Movies, seeking to recapture the atmosphere of the big screen? Now you can simulate those golden days here at Detectives Beyond Borders! Here are this evening's presentations:

1) The Glass Key. The 1935 adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel, starring George Raft, not the 1943 version with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. It features good performances by Raft and by Edward Arnold as political strongman Paul Madvig and lots of knuckle-gnawing by the female leads to indicate nervousness. In spots it captures the narrative intensity of Hammett's great novel, but its ending must be one of the weirdest in Hollywood's long history of tacked-on happy endings.   And why did both movies change the protagonist's name from Ned Beaumont to Ed Beaumont?

2) Private Hell 36. (1954) The cast includes Ida Lupino and Howard Duff, trying his best to look like Sterling Hayden.  The set-up: Two cops split thousands of dollars they recovered from a dead counterfeiter, and complications ensue. The movie is noir until its last two or three minutes, and then it either wusses out and capitulates to the era's demand for moral uplift, or it gets even more noir, depending on one's interpretation. It's a fine, ambiguous ending, in other words, and I wonder if director Don Siegel and the rest of the movie's creative team intended it that way.

3) Once Upon a Time. This 2008 Korean heist comedy is set during Japan's wartime occupation of Korea, which makes the slapstick antics of its Korean freedom-fighter heroes something of a brave move. Several scenes nicely portray Japanese condescension toward even Koreans loyal to the occupying government. Several characters go by both their Korean names and the Japanese names forced upon them by Japanese decree. Surprisingly affecting and resonant for a movie with so much slapstick in it.

4) (Jet Li's) Fearless. This 2006 Hong Kong film is apt to get viewers cheering. A romanticized biography of Huo Yuanjia, a martial artist who took on and defeated foreign challengers at a time when Chinese national pride was at a low ebb and foreign domination at a high.  In the movie, he wins their hearts and friendship in addition to kicking the crap out of them. China's current rulers probably like the character of Nong Jinsun, a businessman friend of Huo's who sells his highly successful restaurant and donates the proceeds and his time to the athletic association Huo founds.

(NB: I'm a Robert Osborne, not a TCM. I'll talk about the movies entertainingly and informatively, but you have to track them down yourselves. The Glass Key is available on YouTube, the rest on Netflix.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or a Chinese Malcolm Tucker in the second century

I leapt from Enter the Dragon, pirouetted in slow motion through the air, silk robes swirling, then landed with one toe on Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame before catapulting high into the sky, turning an aerial somersault, and landing on John Woo's 2008 film Red Cliff.

I liked the latter so much that I've started reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the classic Chinese novel on which the film is based in part. It's a historical novel of high adventure, recounting battles and political maneuvering in the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history, the decades of shifting alliances and power struggles that accompanied the decline of the Han Dynasty.

Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei take the Oath of the Peach
 Garden in a 1591 edition of Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Think a novel so concerned with power struggles can't be entertaining? Here's an adviser speaking boldly to a Han emperor so enfeebled that he has let the palace fall under the sway of eunuchs:

"All the Empire would eat the flesh of the eunuchs if they could, and yet, Sire, you respect them as if they were your parents."

Malcolm Tucker may talk that way, but I suspect few real political advisers do, and that's shame.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Magistrate Pao: Chinese crime fiction from the eleventh century

Connoisseurs of exotic crime stories may know of the Dutch author, scholar, diplomat and collector Robert Van Gulik and the stories he wrote about the real-life Tang Dynasty magistrate Di Renjie, or Judge Dee.

Van Gulik translated an eighteenth-century story about the seventh-century Dee, then went on to write a series of original novels and stories featuring Dee. The tales, along with Van Gulik's forthright and illuminating introductions, shed light on Chinese life in the period, on Chinese taste in crime stories, and on the profound differences between those tastes and their Western counterparts.

Dee was not the only magistrate who found his way into Chinese drama, folklore, opera and crime fiction down through the centuries. This week at Sleuth of Baker Street in Toronto, I found The Strange Cases of Magistrate Pao: Chinese Tales of Crime and Detection, a book of stories about the Song Dynasty (960-1279) magistrate Bao Zheng.

Like Dee, Pao was a magistrate, a position in the Chinese imperial system that combined the roles of administrator, mayor or governor, detective, prosecutor, and judge. Like Dee he was so noted for his rectitude that his fame has lived on in popular art for more than a thousand years.

Leon Comber's rendering of the Pao stories offers a hero more interested than Dee in repairing the social fabric torn by crime. In particular, he delights in finding new mates for those bereft by crime (in accordance with the principle from the Chinese classic of Mencius that "Three things are unfilial, and of these the worst is to have no offspring.")

The Wikipedia article on Bao Zheng says that "In his lifetime, Bao was renowned for his filial piety, his stern demeanor, and his intolerance of injustice and corruption." Official corruption continues to be a problem in today's China, though the Dee and Pao stories suggest the problem has been around for centuries.  If murder is the defining crime in Western crime writing, does official corruption occupy a similar place in Chinese crime fiction? If so, I wonder how the old stories resonate in today's China.

Here's an interesting passage from Wikipedia's article on Chinese crime fiction (and isn't it interesting to see that term applied to popular literature so many centuries older than Poe and Conan Doyle?):

"In the Song dynasty, the growth of commerce and urban society created a demand for many new forms of popular entertainment. `Stories about criminal cases' were among the new types of vernacular fiction that developed from the Song to the Ming periods. ... they nearly always featured district magistrates or judges in the higher courts. ... The plots usually begin with a description of the crime (often including much realistic detail of contemporary life) and culminate in the exposure of the deed and the punishment of the guilty. Sometimes two solutions to a mystery are posited, but the correct solution is reached through a brilliant judge."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Hong Kong movies on China's mainland?

Back to Iron Monkey for a moment: What, I wonder, would Communist Party officialdom think of this Hong Kong movie?

On the one hand, the movie’s heroes are based on real-life revolutionaries against China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing. On the other, the immediate villains are corrupt officials, quite possibly a sore point in Beijing these days. And the movie’s dénouement sounds a hopeful but decidedly cautious note about the arrival of a new governor to replace his venal predecessor. This, in other words, is no rousing allegory of communism coming to save the oppressed peasants.

I’m a tyro when it comes to Hong Kong cinema. Are Hong Kong movies distributed on the Chinese mainland? Does the wider Chinese population get to see them?

(The Wikipedia entry on Iron Monkey, citing as its source the Los Angeles Times, offers information about technical and other changes to the movie for its American release.)

***

I visited Hong Kong in 1990, three years before this version of Iron Monkey was made. I remember: an intoxicating afternoon at the Luk Yu teahouse, two young lovers walking down a busy sidewalk hand in hand, each chatting away on a mobile phone, and a visit with Gigi from Macau at the Bottoms Up Club in Tsim Sha Tsui. Years later, the even-then much experienced bar girl will surely look back on that evening as one of the least memorable of her long career.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A return trip to Lisa Brackmann's Chinese half-world

Lisa Brackmann's second novel will take its protagonist to Mexico, but that book is not due until spring 2012, so for now I'll think of Brackmann as an old China hand. Her first book, Rock, Paper, Tiger, is set there; she's a frequent visitor to Shanghai (where she finds Starbucks a welcome refuge); and, if I recall correctly, she'll return to China for her third novel.

Here's some of what I wrote last year about her first:

"Rock, Paper, Tiger offers some of the most unexpected views you're likely to get of China short of visiting and hanging out with its squatters, scene-makers, disaffected artists, and others who struggle to stay one step ahead of the country's ruthless capitalistic socialistic-with-Chinese-characteristics wrecking ball."

Everyone know that China is the new economic giant, the titan of state-sponsored capitalism, and so on. Everyone knows, too, about the country's party apparatchiks and new entrepreneurs. But what of the folks who are neither of the old China nor eager members of the new? That's the world Brackmann writes about, and that's the world I'll quiz her about next week, when she makes her second appearance on a Bouchercon panel moderated by your humble blogkeeper.

***

Lisa Brackmann will be part of my “NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel on Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Yang Hengjun is missing

Chinese Australian spy novelist and blogger Yang Hengjun has disappeared in China after reporting he was being followed. Here's a creepy excerpt from his Fatal Weakness.

Lisa Brackmann on architecture, demolition and community

Thursday it was Christopher G. Moore on the destruction of traditional Bangkok architecture.

Today it's Lisa Brackmann, another author with whom I'll be panelizing at Bouchercon 2010 next month, on the same phenomenon in China. Here's Brackmann in an interview from earlier this summer:

"Central to the novel [Rock Paper Tiger] is the importance of community, and how do we have meaningful communities when everything is for sale, and this happens in a global economy? I thought about this a lot in terms of Beijing, where modernization has swept away traditional neighborhoods and replaced them with anonymous high rises. Sure, there were a lot of problems in the old hutong areas, and I totally understand the need and desire for central heating and modern plumbing and all of that. But something is inevitably lost as well."

===============

(Lisa Brackmann will be a member of my "Flags of Terror" panel at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco, Friday, Oct. 15, at 10 a.m. Click here for the complete Bouchercon lineup.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Nostalgia and consumerism in post-Communist China

Qiu Xiaolong's sixth Inspector Chen novel is full of interesting and melancholy reflections about China. The author happened to be in the United States during the uprising at Tiananmen Square and the violent reaction to it, and he decided to remain.

Twenty-one years on, his work remains suffused not just with nostalgia but with reflections upon nostalgia. In rampantly commercializing China, such a once-taboo subject as Mao's ex-mistress becomes a public, commercial attraction.

And, in a vicissitude of Chinese history, even Mao, briefly out of favor after his death, recycles into popularity, "becoming a brand name in the materialistic age, with Mao restaurants and Mao antiques and people collecting Mao badges and stamps for their potential value in the market."

Oddest, perhaps, is the old house presided over by an impoverished grandee of a kind who throws parties dedicated to recapturing the grand atmosphere of 1930s Shanghai. Is nostalgia a capitalist thing?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The great ball of China

“So you are a newcomer here, young man. I would like to give you a word or two of advice. Life is short, sixty or seventy years, no point worrying away your days till your hair turns white. Heartbroken for a woman? Come on. A woman is just like that smoked fish head. Not much meat but too many bones, staring at you with ghastly eyes on a white platter. If you're not careful, you get a bone stuck in your throat. Think about Mao. Such a man, and yet he, too, was ruined by his woman—or women. He fucked his brains out in the end.”

— Qiu Xiaolong, The Mao Case

The Mao Case is Qiu's sixth novel. His first, Death of a Red Heroine, is one of my favorite crime novels and one of the spurs to my interest in international crime fiction. The author no longer lives in China.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

4x4: The meme

My fellow award-winning blogger J. Kingston Pierce has tagged me with a meme tailor-made for Detectives Beyond Borders. The meme is built around questions involving the number four, and I especially liked the ones that involved travel and places where one has lived.

Since Jeff expanded the list of questions from eight to ten, I don't feel too badly about making my own adjustments. And you can do the same.


Four places I'd like to go or things I'd like to do:

1) Visit the Angkor temple complex in Cambodia

2) Visit the Ajanta caves in India

3) Hike the length of Hadrian's Wall

4) Complete a short walk I began a few years ago, along the West Kennet Avenue from Avebury to the Sanctuary


Four places I've lived:

1) Montreal

2) Rome

3) Philadelphia

4) The Boston area, which leads to my own category of ...


Four places I've lived in the Boston area:

1) Waltham

2) Brookline, whose no-overnight-parking regulations seemed intended to keep out the folks from ...

3) Brighton

4) Somerville


Four places I've been on vacation:

1) Split, Croatia. By the shimmering blue Adriatic Sea, in a hotel within the precincts of Diocletian's Palace. One of the places that has inspired me with a desire to live there.

2) 桂林 (Guilin, China.) Sweaty, hot, amid spotty air-conditioning and other trappings of a section of China making the uncertain transition to Western-style consumer capitalism. Also home of the near-hallucinogenic beauty of the sandstone natural spires, and the only place I have seen anyone playing a guitar while passenger on a bicycle.

3) Israel/Palestinian territories. Alas, it's not as easy as it once was to visit the Tomb of the Patriarchs to see blind old Muslim sage-like men praying at a site so fundamental to our sense of our own culture.

4) Istanbul, in particular Hagia Sophia, quite possibly the most influential building in the history of the world, and certainly one of the most beautiful. One can see the gallery mosaics up close, and there is something special about seeing and touching the rough, unfinished stone that lines the spiral stairways to the upper levels.


Four foods or drinks I have liked:

1) A nice, medium-rare steak

2) A good Brunello da Montalcino

3) Fresh raspberries

4) Deviled eggs


Four (with ties) books or movies I could read or watch again:

1) Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility

2) Roughing It

3) Any of books 7 through 16 of Bill James' Harpur and Iles novels

4) Seven Samurai, Stray Dog and, appropriately for repeated viewing, Rashomon


Four works of art before which I have stood (or sat) either in deep relaxation, as close as I get to a meditative state, or with a profound sense of receptiveness:

1) Piero della Francesca's Resurrection and Montefeltro Altarpiece (Scan by Mark Harden)

2) Velázquez's Las Meninas

3) Rembrandt's Bathsheba at Her Bath

4) Trajan's Column


Four literary, scientific, artistic or political figures from the past whom I'd like to watch at work or meet for dinner and drinks:

1) Giotto

2) Jane Austen

3) Mark Twain

3a) Charles Darwin

4) Jawaharlal Nehru. Anyone who can write a book of world history from memory and addressed as a series of letters to his daughter is a man to be reckoned with. Anyone who can write a book about his own country and call it The Discovery of India has a passionate intellect that's worth anyone's interest. And the man had a few practical accomplishments as well, I think.


Answers have begun to arrive from four people I think might take it upon themselves to answer these questions:

1) Sucharita Sarkar (yet another evocative post from one of my favorite writers in blogland.)

2) Seana Graham (good reading!)

3) Adrian McKinty (good reading about bridges and food!)

4) Maxine Clarke

and

5) Kerrie, who stepped in graciously for Maxine and talks about her journey from Paradise to Hell and back. Thanks!

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Eliot Pattison talks about Tibet

Eliot Pattison has set five crime novels in Tibet, a place unfortunately much in the news these days. The novels are much concerned with Chinese repression of Tibet and Tibetans, so it's no surprise that the BBC has sought him out for comment.

"I think we're at a very historic moment," Pattison says in an interview on the program The World. Though he does not mention the Beijing Olympics, he does say China increased its repression a year ago. He says the new campaign has included the destruction of religious statues, acts he compares to the Taliban's destruction of the colossal sixth-century Buddhas at Bamiyan in Afghanistan in 2001.

You can hear the complete interview here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Eliot Pattison's ultra-outsider detective

Outsider detective-fiction protagonists do not constitute the world's most exclusive club, but Eliot Pattison's Shan Tao Yun is more profoundly an outsider than most.

He's Han Chinese, but he lives and works in Tibet, where the Chinese are not universally loved, to state the case mildly. Not only has he lost his job as a police investigator in Beijing because he crossed Communist Party officials , but he has been exiled to a brutal labor camp in Tibet as punishment. In the first Inspector Shan novel, the Edgar-winning Skull Mantra, he is still a prisoner when officials reluctantly call on him for help to solve an urgent case. They are so far from anywhere that there is simply no other competent investigator to be found.

Shan's work on that case earns him an uneasy and unofficial freedom that he spends in a secret, illegal Buddhist monastery with monks he met while in prison. He continues in this semi-hidden, shadowy state in Prayer of the Dragon, the fifth in the series.

In this latest novel, he and the monks Gendun and Lokesh have been summoned to an isolated Tibetan village where Beijing's rule had not managed to penetrate thoroughly, but no matter; some of the village traditions are brutal enough on their own without Chinese help. "It was a strange gray place," Shan thinks, "in which the worst of both worlds was combined."

All this makes Shan Tao Yun more of an outsider than your average cop who's impatient with his boss. For one thing, Shan's outsider status is far more dangerous than that of most crime protagonists.

I'll stop now and let you go read the books yourselves. You'll find a list of them here. While you're on your way to the bookshop or library, ponder this question: Of all the outsider crime-fiction protagonists you know, who is the most outside, the most precarious, the most alienated? What makes him or her that way?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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The Skull Mantra (and a question for readers about political commitment in crime novels)

Yesterday I finished Eliot Pattison's The Skull Mantra, a novel set amid Tibet's high, harsh, wind-buffeted peaks. Then I picked up where I'd left off in Peter Temple's Dead Point and found this:

"I went to bed with my book, Dying High: Lies About a Climber's Life, grabbed on my way out to get a taxi to the airport. There is something about the stupidity of climbing mountains that appeals. Perhaps it's the clinging by the fingertips to inhospitable surfaces. I could claim experience in this area."

A rather sharply contrasting attitude to mountains, is it not, and perhaps understandable from a flatlander like the Australian Temple.

Pattison's novel, winner of an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America for best first novel of 1999, has a location of unparalleled interest and exoticism (for many readers). But is has more. For one, it puts a highly unusual spin on the old motif of the unlikely detective pairing. The protagonist, Shan Tao Yun, works with a changing and uncertain roster of partners. Above and beyond the expected squabbles, there are deeper reasons for mutual mistrust and suspicion.

Shan is a Han Chinese official, disgraced and imprisoned at a work camp in Tibet, then given temporary freedom of a kind when officials need an experienced investigator to probe an official's killing. His shifting cast of overseers and helpers includes Chinese and Tibetans, officials and prisoners, uncertain hybrids of the two, monks and soldiers. The clashes of nationalities, politics and sympathies mean Shan can never be sure of his position, whether a given action will land him back in prison, whether Chinese officials are looking over his shoulder and conducting parallel investigations. And that tension pervades the novel from beginning to end.

Political and cultural rivalries are at work, naturally, not just between Chinese and Tibetans, but within both groups. Economic and scientific interests come into play as well, in the form of a Western mining company working against bureaucratic hurdles to meet a production deadline that, among other things, will let it have something to show a soon-to-arrive group of American tourists. All these clashing interests provide, among other things, a wealth of possible suspects.

But above all are the various faces of Tibetan Buddhism, the prayers, the demons, the all-sustaining faith of monks and lay people, the texts, the art, and a sympathetic view of outcast clans whose traditional job is to prepare bodies for "sky burial," all held together by Pattison's strong sympathy for Tibetans. If Clive James was right that most international crime novels, with no original stories to tell, "Essentially .. are guidebooks,” this is one hell of a guidebook.

And now, your question: The Skull Mantra fairly burns with awe for Tibet, its people and its ways, and with anger at China's treatment of all these since the invasion of 1959. How do you feel about strongly expressed opinions of this kind in crime stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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A top-ten list of crime fiction from Asia

I meant to post this one a week ago. Catherine Sampson, who knows something about the subject, writes in the Guardian about her ten favorite crime novels set in Asia. Tops on her list: Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong. She also includes the worthy Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto, whom I've mentioned several times here and whose novel Points and Lines I discussed, with Death of a Red Heroine, in the very first Detectives Beyond Borders post.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

At home in Bombay and Shanghai

How much does a writer’s choice of words contribute to the setting he or she creates – ordinary, everyday words, I mean, not words designed to conjure up exotic scenes. Qiu Xiaolong could have written about Shanghai’s “crowded multifamily dwellings” in his novels about Inspector Cao Chen , just as Vikram Chandra could have placed the Bombay (Mumbai) residents of Sacred Games in “houses” or even in “small, crowded houses.”

But they didn't. Qiu’s characters crowd into subdivided stone shikumen, where they share communal kitchen facilities, mingle in courtyards, and sleep in rooms carved out of spaces on stairway landings. Some of Chandra’s live in kholis, where they may roll out sleep mats in the kitchen at night, or subdivide the one open living area with curtains. By no means is every kholi wretched. A police officer compliments a murder victim’s mother on the nice kholi his son built for the family. An especially proper or upscale dwelling may be referred to as a pucca kholi.

It does not take long before the very words shikumen and kholi conjure up universes of connotations, colors, smells and sounds – and, for readers like me, strangers to the cities where the novels are set, an entirely new kind of space.

It occurs to me, too, that Qiu and Chandra, natives of China and India, respectively, write in English. This, perhaps, makes them all the more eager to make Chinese and a range of Indian languages part of the fiber and substance of their work.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Q&A with Qiu

Via Sarah Weinman comes a link to Newsweek's interview with Qiu Xiaolong, author most recently of A Case of Two Cities. Find out what Qiu thinks of corruption in China and why previous Chinese translators of his novels turned Shanghai into "H-City."

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Qiu Xiaolong on genre and conventions

I've praised Qiu Xiaolong's Death of a Red Heroine often. Christopher G. Moore's site links to an illuminating interview from 2003 with Qiu. Here's an excerpt that every fan of crime fiction and literature that crosses borders will want to read:

"When I wrote the first book, I had not intended to write it as a `detective story,' so I did not pay much attention to special conventions or tricks at the time. I merely wanted to write a book about contemporary China, which has been little introduced in the West, but it turned out to be a mystery. I think it is perhaps because mystery happens to be one of my favorite genres, and it provides a ready framework for the story.

"I chose to set the story in the early 1990s, as it's a transitional period, in which the old value system is being questioned, while the new is not being established. In that sense, I may be more or less like Chief Inspector Chen, an intellectual questioning and being questioned all the time. As a result, the drama is staged outside as well as inside.

"Of course, I am not Chief Inspector Chen. I have never been a cop, or a Party member, but as far as his passion for poetry (for Eliot especially, whose poetry I have translated into Chinese) and for food, he has my shadow. Another passion I share with him is go chess games, as described in the novel. With my second book, my editor insisted on the discovery of a body at the very beginning, and I complied, which may be a trick, but not really mine."

An accolade for one of my favorite crime novels

I've praised Death of a Red Heroine, Qiu Xiaolong's debut novel about Shanghai's Inspector Chen Cao. In addition to my comment in the post that introduced this blog, I cannot think of a more exciting opening to a crime novel than Death of a Red Heroine's first chapter. It backs into the story slowly, violating a supposed rule of crime fiction, and it does so beautifully.

Now (well, back in August) comes a report that the Wall Street Journal ranks Death of a Red Heroine among the five best political novels, along with Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister, Charles McCarry’s Shelley’s Heart, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Think what you will of the Journal's politics, that's pretty fast company.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006