Death of a Red Heroine

Death of a Red Heroine is Qiu Xiaolong’s first novel featuring Chief Inspector Chen of the Shanghai Police and it won the author the Anthony Award for the Best First Crime Novel. As with Red Mandarin Dress, it is a carefully constructed piece of detective fiction and Chen, both a policeman and poet, is a thoroughly likeable, uncorruptable and highly cultured hero. Nevertheless, as much as I enjoyed the book, it failed to grab me in the way that I want and expect crime fiction to do so – for me this wasn’t a page-turner, as such.

And yet I’m not sure whether that is offered as a criticism or not. The political background of China at the beginning of the 1990s and the geographical and cultural background of Shanghai itself looms large in the book. The machinations of the political elite in a one-party state provide Chen with all sorts of obstacles that he must negotiate as he sets out to solve the murder of a former Model Worker, but Chen, who acts as our moral compass, is also a Party member and, if anything, Qiu shows us a powerful elite that is no different from any political establishment – full of the selfish, the selfless, the greedy, the charitable, the corrupted, the honest, the good and the bad. An uncharitable voice might blame the political and cultural detail that Qiu gives us as the reason why the narrative might be a little slow-moving for the genre, but in fact it was this level of detail that I loved so much about the book. Qiu writes well, no doubt, (the bitter sweet ending is particularly well done) and the fact that books like this can find a readership in the Western popular fiction market is a good thing. In future, though, I’ll note expect to race through the next Inspector Chen book, as I might do the next Rebus. It will take a little more time.

Red Mandarin Dress

Qiu Xialong is a Shanghai-born writer now living in the United States and, given the absence of a named translator, I am assuming that he writes in English. I picked this up as part of my holiday reading, as I am woefully unread in Chinese fiction and I was particularly intrigued by how the detective genre might translate into a Chinese context. Red Mandarin Dress is in fact the fifth novel in a series featuring Inspector Chen of the Shanghai Police, this time investigating the murder of a series of women, whose bodies are left in public locations dressed in very expensive red mandarin dresses. Inevitably, I suppose, there are potential problems in setting a detective story, which genre relies on a particularly Western notion of justice and also a particular set of signs/clues for the reader to identify and interpret, in the context of a society with a seemingly very different set of judicial priorities and cultural symbols that I, for one, am unfamiliar with (such as the cultural significance of the red mandarin dress or the complete unfamiliarity with Western psychology, which underpins much Western detective fiction). But the author handles these tensions extremely well and uses them to his advantage. He is very good at giving the reader enough information without it feeling clunky and overwritten. Additionally, the China that is portrayed here is a country in the midst of change, coming to terms with an acceptance of Western-style capitalism that must seem as alien to most of its population, as some of the food eaten within the pages of the novel (and I suspect he may be teasing us a little here!) seems to us. The very notion of cultural clashes and contraditions lies at the heart of this. In fact, this is so much the case that I found myself enjoying this aspect of the book more than I felt myself driven along by the tension of narrative. I wasn’t carried along by the story so much here – by which  mean it wasn’t so much of an old-fashioned page-turner – but it has left me wanting to read the first of these novels, which is now sitting on my shelf waiting to be read.