Death of a Red Heroine (An Inspector Chen Investigation)

The Chinese American Writer Qiu Xiaolong published the first book in the Inspector Chen Cao Investigation series in 2000. The title of the book is Death of a Red Heroine. Inspector Chen Cao is the “head of the special case squad, Homicide Division, Shanghai Police Bureau” (Xiaolong 8). Chen writes poetry, and the book includes many references to Chinese poetry. Before he became a police officer, Chen wrote a thesis on the poetry of T.S. Elliot (Xiaolong 392). Xiaolong, the writer of the novel, was born in Shanghai. The city of Shanghai is a character in the novel. Xiaolong is skilled at creating a sense of place in this novel. The naked dead body of a young woman was found in a black plastic bag in the Baili Canal in Shanghai. The dead woman turned out to be a model communist worker, Guan Hongying. Guan works at the cosmetics section of a department store in Shanghai. She kept her life outside her life as a National Model Worker hidden. To solve the case, Chen has to navigate the communist party’s bureaucracy. The novel is set in 1990, during China's rapid economic growth. Both the shadow of the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 hang over the novel. Inspector Chen’s assistant, Detective Yu Guangming, is a prominent character in the novel. The novel was heavily influenced by the noirish style of mystery novels. I enjoyed the novel. Works Cited: Knight, Sabina. 2012. Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Naremore, James. 2019. Noir Film: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Kindle.

The murder mystery was meh, what was fascinating were the descriptions of life in Shanghai as China moved into a more capitalist mode