Qiu Xiaolong Talks about His Shanghai Crime Series on SCENE OF THE CRIME

[J. Sydney Jones]

Crime Tales of Shanghai: Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen Novels

July 8, 2010 by Scene of the Crime | Edit

China-born author, Qiu Xiaolong, is the Anthony Award-winning creator of the Inspector Chen series, set in 1990s Shanghai. The series, which started in 2000 with Death of a
Red Heroine, now has six installments with the 2009 addition The
Mao Case, and has been translated into twenty languages. The Wall
Street Journal called Xiaolong’s first novel one of the five best
political novels of all time, ranking it with Arthur Koestler’s Darkness
at Noon. Of The Mao Case, a reviewer for Booklist
noted that it is “full, as always, of crisp detail and vivid
atmospherics evoking contemporary Shanghai.” A Publishers Weekly
contributor also had praise for the 2007 series addition, Red
Mandarin Dress, pointing to its “first-rate characterizations and
elegant portrait of a society attempting to move from rigid Maoist
ideologies to an accommodation with capitalism.”

To continue, go to SCENE OF THE CRIME.

[B.R.Stateham]

This is a surprise. I just finished reading Death of a Red Heroine.
The surpris is the book got much better past the first 100 pages. But it was no where near as fabulous as all the accolades reviewers gave it.