Tsing-Boum!, Commissaris Van der Valk and Indo-China in Crime Fiction

Funny how so many of the great crime and espionage writers have taken excursions to Asia in their careers. Of course Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American (1955) about Indo-China and set largely in Saigon while John Le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) is still by far one of the best books about Hong Kong, and one of the only featuring Vientiane. Eric Ambler, the great espionage writer of the 1930s, dipped into Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and Indonesia in Passage of Arms (1959). In fact that’s a pretty good reading list to kick of 2014 if you haven’t read those books.

One writer who also has a fleeting venture to the region is Nicholas Freeling, the creator of the Commissaris Van der Valk series, of which there are about a dozen novels featuring the Amsterdam-based detective. Tsing-Boum! (1969) is one of the later ones in the series and has the Commissaris travelling to France and Belgium on the trail of a murder which has its origins in the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu (a central event for Greene too obviously) and recriminations that ratchet down the decades….