Will I love Death of a Red Heroine?

The first of Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen series is just a great story. One reason I read is to explore places, and one place I’m always happy to return to is Shanghai.

This book contains events and characters that can only be found in China, and yet the story itself is pure genre, a police procedural centered on a detective who really wishes he were a poet. 

Without the setting, it’s a great read. With the setting, it’s a chance to explore China.

While teaching a class on China, a student highly recommended this book by a Chinese author living in St. Louis. The novel, the first in a Shanghai-based detective series, immediately captivated me, leading me to read the entire collection.

Though I had studied the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), this book provided a rare insight into the daily lives and private thoughts of those living under its rule. It offered a deeper understanding of a philosophy so different from our own, making it an invaluable read.

Set in the time of great transformation, from one type of political system to another, this is the first in the excellent Inspector Chen series. Likeable characterse, shadowy high-ups in the administrations, a simple crime that unravels lives. An insight into Shanghai of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which could be, of course, about people and their hopes almost anywhere.

Superb, strongly recommended.

Due to strict censorship, Professor Qiu decided to use the detective story genre and his hero, Detective Chen, to be able to publish a critical view on developments in modern Chinese society without getting locked up. Another device commonly used by Chinese authors is to deal with contemporary issues using historical settings or science fiction.

There’s a kind of charm and naïveté about the detective in this book, he is a relatively strait-laced character and his shock and moral outrage at the sexual and material excesses of some of the corrupt children of high-ranking CCP officials betokens a wholly different society and upbringing, conditioned by Party propaganda. Inspector Chen revels in poetry and ‘good' food, although descriptions of banquets of turtles and bear’s paws again speak of different cultural tastes. The story is delivered slowly—this is set in a Shanghai before computers and mobile phones and the hero must wend his way around town to… show more.