The Fifth In A Series of Mysteries

Bill Powell, writing in Time's The China Blog, recommends Red Mandarin Dress and compares Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen to Martin Cruz Smith's Arkday Renko stories.

Red Mandarin Dress, An Inspector Chen Novel by Qiu Xiaolong is now on the shelves. It is the fifth book featuring Inspector Chen and set in 1990's Shanghai. The series progression has been:

• Death of a Red Heroine (2000)
• A Loyal Character Dancer* (2002)
• When Red is Black (2004)
• A Case of Two Cities (2006)
• Red Mandarin Dress* (2007)

* Owned by Independence Public Library

Being Chinese and having been born in China, Qiu Xiaolong has the chops to pull back the curtain and reveal to us the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and show us the society that has resulted. Although he now lives and writes in St. Louis, the author was born and raised in Shanghai. As Powell points out in The China Blog, Qiu is writing in English which is his second language.

The Wall Street Journal named his first book, Death of a Red Heroine (2000) one of the five best political novels of all time. Their listing was as follows:

1. The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope (1876)
2. Shelley's Heart by Charles McCarry(1995)
3. Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong (2000)
4. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1941)
5. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)

This list is not of my making and is going to force me to take up some dusty books to see what I have missed. At any rate, they have put this newcomer in heady company with his first outing. The novel was also picked as an Edgar Winner for a first novel.

I apologize for letting this one slip by me until now. I for one, look forward to a new (to me) author. We will see about picking up the three that we do not own at this time.

This interview features Qiu Xiaolong talking about Red Mandarin Dress: