Over the last ten years, Qiu Xiaolong has written one of the most interesting procedural series I’ve ever read. His Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police is a man of character trying to do his job honestly, walking a tricky path, investigating high profile, politically sensitive cases. From his debut in 2000’s Death of a Red Heroine, through The Mao Case the Inspector has covered his city’s and country’s social strata from bottom to top—where reading and speaking between the lines is a basic survival skill. The art of constant calculation and careful articulation that is practiced every moment of Chen’s days reminds me a bit of a mirror opposite of Bernie Gunther in Phillip Kerr’s pre-war books. Where Berlin was a city on the precipice of a great and swift decline, Shanghai is skyrocketing to the top of the world, and I’m not sure which scenario is more frightening for these characters of integrity. Wherever the world is being won or lost the stakes are high.
Like his creator Chen Cao is a poet, a lover and translator of western verse, (in fact, it was Qiu’s work translating T.S. Elliot, that first brought him to the United States more than twenty years ago), and when the policeman loses himself in contemplation of a line of poetry or philosophy, you can feel the author’s own pensiveness, struggling with, or just as often, delighting in finding an apt correlation in his work and the world around him. Just as in poetry, Qiu found something he responded to in the fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle and especially the Swedish duo Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, who exercised serious social writing in the form of mystery novels.
And Qiu is a lover of form. His poetic work is testament to that. The discipline of form and the ability to express ideas multi-laterally is a passion and a strength of his. Set in the nexus of communism and capitalism and hung upon the framework of a procedural, his novels present an intriguing two-way lens through which to see modern China, (and America for that matter).
But it’s his new book, Years of Red Dust, a collection of linked short stories set in Shanghai from 1949-2005, and absent Chen, (a character with whom he has much in common), that is Qiu Xiaolong’s most personal work yet. No, not a mystery, I’m afraid, but based on his previous books, (including his poetry), I’d say this is the one he’s been working toward for a while, and actually a wonderful place to start if you’re contemplating reading him. Here’s why:
China’s last century is so dense and complex, so overtly radical and still mysterious to outside eyes, that the subtleties and nuance of Qiu’s storytelling are sometimes lost on Western audiences. As an insider stepping back, his vantage point is unique too in unpacking the significance and far-reaching effects of the events his family and countrymen have gone through.
His style is deceptively simple and straightforward, and like the best writers, invisible except in retrospect. He also possesses a gift for contextualizing history that turns his stories into the proverbial spoonful of sugar helping the medicine go down. Tasty, tasty medicine.
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
