The ghosts of Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution as well as the reality of Deng Xiaoping's Party loom over this police procedural set in Shanghai in 1990, the year after Tiananmen Square. This book is the first in a series about Inspector Chen-a Shanghai police inspector who is also a poet and a translater of Western mysteries. I have a compulsion about reading series in order.


The story involves the murder of a young woman whose body has been dumped in a canal and accidentally found by a police boat captain who takes a friend fishing while he is supposed to be out on patrol (one of many great asides in the book that raise the story above a regular mystery.) Inspector Chen's special case squad is assigned the case which quickly becomes a political interest after the victim is identified as a famous national model worker. This causes the party to get involved and for Chen and his partner Yu to be forced to work with a dogmatic and clueless retired Party member for "guidance." The story of how Chen and Yu are forced to work within the convoluted system (eventually, they both run afoul of the Party and Internal Security) and the revelation of what life was like for ordinary citizens in this time and place is as interesting as the case. Some of the things Xiaolong describes, such as the poor, congested condition of worker dormitories, are still very much an issue in China now.


I also liked Xiaolong's leisurely pace. I liked the investigation and the characters but the author also really wants to capture the atmosphere of Shanghai in that time and he succeeds (I think, as I've never been there.) I also like the way the dialogue feels like it was transcribed from the Chinese so you get a genuine feel for the way people interact and not a smoother but Westernized rendition. So while conversations feels stilted in places, they also feel authentic. You can guess from the name the author is Chinese (and he is from Shanghai), but he lives in the States now and the book was published in English. I liked the little details such as Yu resenting his boss in the beginning because he has a luxurious efficiency apartment (with his own telephone) all to himself while Yu has to share a single room in a shikumen house with his wife and son. Finally, I liked the way this book slowly sucked me in until I couldn't stop reading and finally, putting the book down to wonder where the hell I was. Shanghai felt that real to me.

Incidentally, I always do a lot of Googling when I read a book about the location and its history. In the course of doing that for this book, I watched a virtual tour of Shanghai on YouTube. With all of the talk in the book about corrupting Western bourgeois influence in China, it's pretty funny to see Shanghai now has a Hooters. Wings and hot pants--bringing the world together.