Red Mandarin Dress

This is the second book written by a modern Chinese that I've read. What was interesting about both writers' style was the descriptiveness, particularly of color. This mystery is set in modern Shanghai with some flashback to the Cultural Revolution. The take on Shanghai's development and the dissonance between the facts of life there and the fading memory of working toward a workers paradise also made for a thoughtful read. I'll have to go back and read the earlier volumes now. Page 100 had a thoughtful poem on it and others are sprinkled throughout the tome.

To the ranks of such modern-day fictional detectives as Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko and P.D. James's Adam Dalgliesh, add Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen. RED MANDARIN DRESS presents Qiu's irrepressible Shanghai police inspector in his fifth crime novel along with his familiar cast of side characters from those earlier works. Like Arkady Renko, Chen is a loner and a thinker, a dogged deducer and a clever intuitionist whose case approach marks him as idiosynchratic among his peers. Like Renko, Chen lives alone, dresses somewhat lackadaisically, appeases his superiors just enough so he can ignore them, and generally follows the proverbial beat of his own drummer. Like Adam Dalgliesh, Chen is a literary detective, well educated and given to studying and writing poetry. RED MANDARIN DRESS opens with the appearance of a young woman's murdered body, found posed in a flowerbed on a very public Shanghai street. The dead woman, Jasmine, was a hotel worker, living an utterly nondescript life, but she is found wearing a torn red mandarin dress, usually called a qipao or cheongsam, in the classic Chinese style: high collar, full length, body hugging, side slit to the thigh. Hers is a vintage design, however, dating back to the days before the Cultural Revolution. Exactly one week later, another young woman is found murdered, dressed the same way and left in another very public Shanghai location. Another week passes, and a third body appears, and then a fourth, one of Chen's associates who had agreed to work undercover. At the same time Shanghai is gripped by its first publicly reported serial murder case, Inspector Chen is asked to follow another case involving public corruption in a real estate development. He is also experiencing a sort of dual existential and career crisis. Should he continue as a police detective or return to his first intellectual love, Tang Dynasty poetry, for which he is trying to write a paper analyzing the treatment of women in three such poems? As the detective story moves inexorably toward its climactic face-off between Chen and the murderer, Qiu treats the reader with a fascinating introduction to Tang Dynasty poetry, a core element of Chinese culture. He juxtaposes Chen's paper's theme of "thirsty illness," a literal reference to diabetes but a metaphorical reference to romantic love, with the killer's own thirsty illness for revenge. Along the way, Qiu inserts additional elements of decidedly non-Chinese Freudian psychological theory into Chen's search for a serial killer's motives. Chen is no Sherlock Holmes, magically pulling a rabbit out of a hatful of clues; rather, he is more bloodhound, catching a faint scent and following it determinedly to its eventful conclusion. What makes Qiu Xiaolong's stories stand out as more than just mystery novels is his exemplary folding of Chinese history abd culture into his work. References to Tang Dynasty poetry and the mass criticism of Wang Guangmei (as wife of President Liu Sha

The charming and inscrutable Inspector Chen series continues with, perhaps, Shanghai's first serial murder case. Torn between being a good cop and indulging his literary bent, Chen takes a brief vacation to research and write a paper on classical Chinese romantic literature. Meanwhile a murderer who dresses his female victims in a red Mandarin dress has emerged, and Chen also is asked to look into a politically charged real estate corruption case. Somehow all these unrelated elements seem to tie together as Chen on the sidelines comes to grips with the various clues. As in previous entries in the series, the author uses the vast changes in China--culturally, economically, socially and otherwise--to provide an authenticity o the mystery. The failings of human nature, as well as the Cultural Revolution, play a pivotal part in the story. While the plot doesn't move forward at a fast pace, it does develop step-by-step, leading Chen (and the reader) toward a logical conclusion. As usual, Chen is an iconoclast, using all his wiles including Freud (unheard of in China) to analyze the case, as well as fending off potential hazards of a political nature, avoiding offending the Party. Chen is no Charlie Chan, thank the Lord, but his knowledge of Confucian philosophy, Buddhism, contemporary China, Maoism and other aspects of Modern China is both informative and droll. A joy to read, and I can't wait for the next installment.

Mr. Qiu's best novel yet! As a skilled writer, Xiaolong takes us on an exceedingly well-written journey into contemporary China and its history with his latest novel of Chief Inspector Chen Cao. The novel is dynamic and suspenseful with so many twists and turns of events that provide a glowing insight into China today, creating a multi-perspective panorama of the society through the interplay of dynamic historical periods, in which his characters are intertwined. The plots and the characters paint a picture that no history book can give us, for we share with him the socio-psychological images of the people in history. Along with this rich imagery, we are enabled to examine them more closely and make them come alive as we conjecture in our own mind the plots and sub-plots through their interaction within contempory China. China's modern historical timeline is now paralleled by its fast growing economy and social change. The author succinctly defines the flux and the resulting impasse that history creates within the present. The ending of the book lends itself to an examination of the novel's antagonist, the Chief Inspector, as he examines the Cultural Revolution, its victims, and his own plight.

This is the best of the series so far. It tells an interesting story and mechanically, it is the most effectively written of the Inspector Chen novels. In short: It packs a lot of plot and subplot into a neat little package. The murder is an interesting crime with roots in the Cultural Revolution, and a sub-plot about Chen working on an MA degree folded neatly into the pursuit of the killer. The regular characters all move forward in their development, and you get a far better picture of Inspector Chen as a man trapped in a career which is is good at, but which doesn't satisfy his soul. A few reviews of the previous books have been critical of the amount of poetry and food conversation - well, here the right balance is struck. And even the rather disturbing "live monkey brain" (or as Chen calls them - cruel dishes) plays into the plot near the end. For me, I'll stick to cashew chicken. The only down side is that the book is read and I probably have another 12 months to wait for the next one!