Death of a Red Heroine - great book!

I've praised this book elsewhere, and I was rather worrying that it was just an accumulation of my interests coinciding with the themes of the novel that had me so pleased, but now I have found an objective review which said all I'd like to say, only better than I would have (in my constant haste), so I quote from it here:





DEATH OF A RED HEROINE
By QIU XIAOLONG
New York: Soho Press, 2000. 464 pages, $25

Andrea Kempf


China has enjoyed a long tradition of crime fiction, dating back to at least the Tang dynasty, when tales of jurists who often solved their mysteries with the aid of ghosts rather than detection or common sense were popular. However, almost none of the genre has been available in the West, with the exception of The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, an eighteenth-century novel based on the exploits of a seventh-century judge, which was translated into English by the Dutch scholar and diplomat Robert van Gulik. Better known than his translation is the series of popular novels that van Gulik went on to write in English based on the character of Judge Dee. The twentieth-century detective novels set in China available to Western readers have been written either by visitors to the country or by Western authors inventing an imaginary China. Finally, with Death of a Red Heroine, English-language readers have a genuine Chinese novel of detection, written by Shanghai-born Qui Xiaolong, who came to the United States on a Ford Foundation fellowship in 1988 and stayed on after the pro-democracy debacle in Tiananmen Square.

(Well expressed paragraphs deleted here, mainly for copyright reasons - I don't want to quote the whole thing in case I'm stepping on toes.)

What raises the novel well above a typical police procedural is the quirky, erudite inspector. Chen is able to quote a Tang-dynasty poem appropriate to every situation; and when Chinese poetry fails, he quotes T. S. Eliot or Matthew Arnold. He delights in eating a good meal, and the many that he consumes are described along the way to the murder's solution. He is an earnestly good man, picking his way through the political minefield represented by the case, trying to see that justice is served, and that the demands of the state are met. The supporting characters are equally engaging: ... All of these very real people, moving through a very real Shanghai, trying to decide what is appropriate behavior for China in the 1990s, are part of a mosaic that creates an authentic picture of the country as it charges into the twenty-first century with a new economy but an old political structure. Death of a Red Heroine is much more than a detective story. It is an elegant, true-to-life portrait of China today.

Andrea Kempf is a professor and librarian at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. In 1993, she participated in a teaching exchange at the Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xian, China. She is a regular reviewer of fiction for Library Journal and was recently named Library Journal Fiction Reviewer of the Year 2000.

The review can be found at http://www.persimmon-mag.com/winter2001/bre_win2001_5.htm