Red Alert in Shanghai

Death of a Red Heroine

Qiu Xiaolong

Soho, New York, 2000

Price: $15,  Pg: 464

Ratna Raman Delhi

This book caught my eye during the course of an eclectic book-buying expedition. The title was sufficiently intriguing and the blurbs on the front and back covers announcing 'Anthony Award Winner' and 'Edgar Award Nominee' for 'Best First Mystery Novel' motivated me to read it through. Its Shanghai-born author Qiu Xiaolong has been living in the US since 1989 (where the eligibility for and the availability of abundant prizes will always be an incentive to write), presumably, in the aftermath of Tiananmen.

The book wastes little time in furnishing the mandatory dead body, a prerequisite for any kind of mystery. This dead body, the subject of the opening lines of the narrative, is found in 1990 in Bailli Canal, 20 miles to the west of Shanghai. However, Death of a Red Heroine is not a modern day Agatha Christie murder mystery. Nor does the narrator mesmerise us with the delicious, languorous prolonging of terror that Mary Higgins Clark has now patented to perfection.

The narrative detail and the preoccupation with the female body and its graphic descriptions are reminiscent of Peter Robinson, but Inspector Chen Cao, poet-policeman and hero of the tale is different from the avuncular, overweight cop who calls the shots in Robinson's narratives. One's reading interest is sustained by the leisurely unfolding of Shanghai and Guangzhou in front of our eyes, the unhurried descriptions of its streets, inhabitants, culture and cuisine.  This narrative parallels the systematic monitoring and intervention by the State which is captured in painstaking detail through the everyday lives of several characters in these bustling cities.

Chief Inspector Chen Cao is an avid literophile, with a Masters in English and American Literature. He chronicles Chinese poetry, translates poems and novels and visits local markets and libraries in search of older books and poems, apparently of little value in the market-driven China of the 1990s. Like his author, Chen too is a member of 'The Writer's Association' and is a published poet.