Last year (2022) the South China Morning Post weekend magazine published my short story – Murder on the Shanghai Express (click here) – in their Christmas issue. Shanghai Municipal Police Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) John Creighton is eager to get home from Peking having delivered a prisoner. He takes the Christmas Eve Shanghai Express home only to find himself trapped in a snowdrift and with a murdered man in the First Class Observation Car….
And this year (on December 17th to be precise) DCI Creighton is back in the pages of the Post magazine Christmas edition. It’s a year later, 1930, and all John Creighton wants is to get home in the Christmas Eve snow to his log fire and family dinner. But a chance encounter with an old colleague on the way sees him involved in another Christmas mystery…
Located in downtown Porto, the Carmo and Carmelitas churches have a trio of nice 18th century Portuguese made Chinoiserie grandfather clocks in cut and turned wood and with laquered fronts…
Jeffrey Kinkley’s China Mysteries (University of Hawaii Press) is a neat summation of much of the crime fiction featuring China by writers overseas (by Chinese and foreign authors) set in contemporary (ish) China. Big names like Qiu Xiaolong, Peter May and others as well as reminding me that writers who have moved on from crime, like Lisa See, also write some great procedurals while some, like Cathy Sampson, stopped too soon. Not sure there’s any great conclusions fo be drawn, but it’s a handy overview and prompts a few ‘must rereads’. Out end of December 2023.
With the 1989 Beijing massacre fading from popular memory in the West, China from the mid-1990s to a few years ago felt more open than ever to global trade, communication, travel, and cultural and educational exchanges. There was even talk in the mainstream press that China was heading toward a more democratic future. It was during this second Sino-Western honeymoon that authors in the US, Canada, France, the UK, and elsewhere began writing mystery fiction set in contemporary China in their regional languages. These “China mysteries”—crime, detective, and mystery thriller novels that take place in China but were not written or published there—formed a new genre of popular fiction that highlighted the world’s hopes and fears after Tiananmen. The multinational and multicultural writers of China mysteries, among them ex-PRC nationals like Qiu Xiaolong, Zhang Xinxin, and Diane Wei Liang, converged on the China Mainland to negotiate political and cultural complexities through crime fiction plotlines. Their books emerged from Western lineages of the modern novel and popular genre fiction—with Chinese contributions—and depended on Western commercial publishing models shaped by cultural, national, political, and economic factors.
This work examines more than a hundred China mysteries—many describing and analyzing social and economic changes at the center of modern life in China—to provide a brief history of the genre and analyze the formulaic and original elements of the mysteries, including their attention to matters of location, social content, characterization, history, and biography. It also highlights the role of “information” acquisition as a motivation for readers and authors of popular fiction, which has become a topic of discussion in Chinese literature studies.
With its timely commentary on Sino-Western relations as presented through crime fiction, China Mysteries will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary Chinese literature and culture, as well as fans of crime novels and others who are curious about the global dimensions of the genre and how it complicates our understanding of “world literature.”
Click here for a recording of my Christmas reading for RTHK3’s Morning Brew in Hong Kong – an abridged version of my chapter in Destination Peking (Blacksmith Books) of the chapter on Denton Welch’s life in Shanghai and his 1932 Christmas in Peking’s Legation Quarter.
Shanghai Demimondaine From Sex Worker To Society Matron – Nick Hordern (Earnshaw Books) – occasionally a book comes along that breaks new ground. Who knew Emily Hahn’s Miss Jill had a real inspiration? More flesh on the bones of old Shanghai.
Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future – Ian Johnson (Allen Lane) – History is invariably the first and last battleground for repressive regimes and the fight for control is real and nasty. Recovering those that seek to truthfully record their country’s past is important stuff.
Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong – Vaudine England (Corsair) – cometh the hour, cometh the book – there could not be a better time for a new history of Hong Kong that gets us away from a litany of governors and officials and gives the city back to its multicultural roots.
Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food – Fuchsia Dunlop (Particular Books) – a wonderfully meandering and charming study of Chinese cuisine thankfully (for us non-cooks) recipe free to make us feel bad about eating out all the time.
The Race to the Future: The Adventure That Accelerated the Twentieth Century – Kassia St Clair (John Murray) – a highly readable account of one of the most bonkers events ever – the 1907 Peking-Paris Car Race – and additional meditations on the coming of the modern to China and the world in the form of the combustion engine, petrol, the telegraph etc.
Chinese Dreams in Romantic England: The Life and Times of Thomas Manning – Edward Weech (University of Manchester Press) – A great study (based largely on Manning’s correspondence) of one of England’s first China scholars. To say it was tricky to get to China and learn Chinese in the early 1800s would be the understatement of the century.
Brian E Walter’s new assessment of the British and Commonwealth contribution to the defeat of Japan in the Pacific…
The monumental struggle fought against Imperial Japan in the Asia/Pacific theater during World War II is primarily viewed as an American affair. While the United States did play a dominant role, the British and Commonwealth forces also made major contributions – on land, at sea and in the air – eventually involving over a million men and vast armadas of ships and aircraft. It was a difficult and often desperate conflict fought against a skilled and ruthless enemy that initially saw the British suffer the worst series of defeats ever to befall their armed forces. Still, the British persevered and slowly turned the tables on their Japanese antagonists. Fighting over an immense area that stretched from India in the west to the Solomon Islands in the east and Australia in the south to the waters off Japan in the north, British and Commonwealth forces eventually scored a string of stirring victories that avenged their earlier defeats and helped facilitate the demise of the Japanese Empire.
Often overlooked by history, this substantial war effort is fully explored in Forgotten War. Meticulously researched, the book provides a complete, balanced and detailed account of the role that British and Commonwealth forces played on land, sea and in the air during this crucial struggle. It also provides unique analysis regarding the effectiveness and relevance of this collective effort and the contributions it made to the overall Allied victory.
Last Emperor Revisited – Basil Pao (Hong Kong University Press) – set photos frokm the classic film.
Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective (Prestel) – tie-in with the London Photographer’s Gallery exhibition this year.
Tokyo Jazz Joints – Philip Arneill (Kehrer Verlag) – lovely images of those charming little bars of the Japanese capital.
Japan on a Glass Plate: The Adventure of Photography in Yokohama and Beyond, 1853–1912 – Sebastian Dobson (Ludion) – a fantastic study of early photography in the Yokohama treaty port.
Watch With Wonder – Palani Mohan – (Hong Kong University Press) – incredible images from Nepal to Mongolia, Hong Kong Varanasi
