Red Mandarin Dress

Much More Than Just a Mystery Novel Set in Shanghai: To the ranks of such modern-day fictional detectives as Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko and P.D. James's Adam Dalgliesh, add Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen. RED MANDARIN DRESS presents Qiu's irrepressible Shanghai police inspector in his fifth crime novel along with his familiar cast of side characters from those earlier works. Like Arkady Renko, Chen is a loner and a thinker, a dogged deducer and a clever intuitionist whose case approach marks him as idiosynchratic among his peers. Like Renko, Chen lives alone, dresses somewhat lackadaisically, appeases his superiors just enough so he can ignore them, and generally follows the proverbial beat of his own drummer. Like Adam Dalgliesh, show more Chen is a literary detective, well educated and given to studying and writing poetry.

RED MANDARIN DRESS opens with the appearance of a young woman's murdered body, found posed in a flowerbed on a very public Shanghai street. The dead woman, Jasmine, was a hotel worker, living an utterly nondescript life, but she is found wearing a torn red mandarin dress, usually called a qipao or cheongsam, in the classic Chinese style: high collar, full length, body hugging, side slit to the thigh. Hers is a vintage design, however, dating back to the days before the Cultural Revolution. Exactly one week later, another young woman is found murdered, dressed the same way and left in another very public Shanghai location. Another week passes, and a third body appears, and then a fourth, one of Chen's associates who had agreed to work undercover. At the same time Shanghai is gripped by its first publicly reported serial murder case, Inspector Chen is asked to follow another case involving public corruption in a real estate development. He is also experiencing a sort of dual existential and career crisis. Should he continue as a police detective or return to his first intellectual love, Tang Dynasty poetry, for which he is trying to write a paper analyzing the treatment of women in three such poems?

As the detective story moves inexorably toward its climactic face-off between Chen and the murderer, Qiu treats the reader with a fascinating introduction to Tang Dynasty poetry, a core element of Chinese culture. He juxtaposes Chen's paper's theme of "thirsty illness," a literal reference to diabetes but a metaphorical reference to romantic love, with the killer's own thirsty illness for revenge. Along the way, Qiu inserts additional elements of decidedly non-Chinese Freudian psychological theory into Chen's search for a serial killer's motives. Chen is no Sherlock Holmes, magically pulling a rabbit out of a hatful of clues; rather, he is more bloodhound, catching a faint scent and following it determinedly to its eventful conclusion.

What makes Qiu Xiaolong's stories stand out as more than just mystery novels is his exemplary folding of Chinese history abd culture into his work. References to Tang Dynasty poetry and the mass criticism of Wang Guangmei (as wife of President Liu Shaoqi, China's "First Lady") during the Cultural Revolution bring elements of those eras to life and introduce the reader to their place in the Chinese psyche. Inspector Chen's interactions with other characters exemplify such fascinating aspects of Chinese life as the importance of connections (guangxi) and the exchanging of favors. Qiu delves as well into the mystique of Chinese/Asian women as threatening to men, the predatory femme fatale. The role of food in Chinese culture also plays a major role in RED MANDARIN DRESS, including the book's climax that takes place over what has to be one of literature's strangest dinner menus.

Readers may want to take special note of this book's dedication: "To my elder brother, Xiaowei - but for luck, what happened to him during the Cultural Revolution could have happened to me." It is more than coincidental that this line repeats itself at the end of Chapter 30. Qiu Xiaolong, who has lived in the United States since 1989 and writes his stories in English, lived through those dark days of Mao's rule. As he writes on his website, his family had a 1960's magazine with a photo of a young boy and his mother, dressed in a red qipao, looking off into a glorious horizon above the caption, "Mother, Let's Go There." Qiu notes that he sometimes identified himself with the young boy from that picture and later wondered what happened to mother and son during the Cultural Revolution and beyond. Thus the kernel of the story line for RED MANDARIN DRESS, as much a fascinating literary and cultural study of past and present China as it is a first-rate mystery novel. Highly recommended even for those, like me, who are not avid fans of mystery stories. show less

When Shanghai’s Chief Inspector Chen is asked to look into a politically charged corruption case, he begs off with the excuse that his studies for his literature course won’t give him enough time for it. He’s been meaning to enroll in a literature course, so what better time than now? Chen’s course also keeps him away from headquarters as his colleagues investigate a serial murder case in which the victims are found wearing red mandarin dresses. Even though he is officially on leave, Chen works behind the scenes to help his partner Yu identify and catch the serial killer.

I didn’t enjoy this series installment as much as I’ve liked earlier books in the series. It’s been several years since I read the last book in this show more series, but Chen seemed more impulsive than the Chen I remembered. It seems surprising that Chen could decide to take a leave of absence or go on vacation without letting his employer know what he was doing. This book didn’t include as much poetry as I remember from previous books in the series, but classical Chinese literature is more prominent in this one. I didn’t enjoy the descriptions of food, particularly the “cruel dishes”. There wasn’t enough of Yu’s wife, Peiqin, a sharp woman whose insight is often helpful in investigations, and Yu’s father, Old Hunter, only appears at the other end of a telephone and readers don’t even get to hear his voice.

I liked the historical antecedents of the crime in China’s Cultural Revolution, and what amounts to an insider’s perspective of that era. Chen’s reflections on the differences between between Chinese culture and philosophy and Western culture and Freudian psychology were also interesting. show less

The beginning of this installment in the series started off a bit slowly for me, I suspect because of the time spent with characters other than Chen himself. I don't enjoy being attached to the other characters so much, especially when it comes to Yu and his wife, and for a while it felt as if they were actually going to be the focus here more so than Chen. By the midway point, though, the book evened out for me and felt more like earlier works in the series, so that I could get lost in Chen's investigation and other concerns. I wouldn't say this is the strongest in the series for me, but I still enjoyed it and look forward to reading more of the series.

Qiu's "Inspector Chen" series are masterful, multi-textured mysteries, combining good mysteries in the context of socio-economic upheavel in the 1990s and Chen's deep interest in classical Chinese poetry and his CCP affiliation. This novel mixes a serial murderer and a thuggish real estate scam within a background of Cultural Revolution insanity and Party insider pay-offs. The Western psychology motif is weak and some of the "cruel" dining scenes seem drawn from Unmentionable Cuisine, but a delight to read for the continuing insights into Chinese society.

Newspapers went wild with theories. No murderer would have dumped a body in such a dress, at such a location, without some reason. One reporter saw it pointing at the Shanghai Music Institute, located across the street opposite the flower bed. One deemed it a political case, a protest against the reversal of values in socialist China, for the mandarin dress, once condemned as a sign of capitalist decadence, had become popular again. A tabloid magazine went further, speculating that the murder had been orchestrated by a fashion industry tycoon. Ironically, one result of the media coverage was that several stores immediately displayed new lines of mandarin dresses in their windows.

"Red Mandarin Dress" is set in the 1990s, at a time when show more China is in transition, undergoing rapid social and economic change. The Big Bucks are making obscene amounts of money while the poor are getting poorer, corruption is rife and the police can no longer rely on neighbourhood committee membersknowing every detail of the lives of people living in their areas.

When a young woman clad only in a red mandarin dress is found dead by a main road in Shanghai, followed a week later by the discovery of a second body in an equally prominent spot, there is no way for the authorities to hush it up even though their position has always been that there are no serial killers in China. As psychology was frowned on until recently, the police are forced to begin by discussing the serial killers they have read about in Western novels, before managing to get their hands on some psychology text books.

Chief Inspector Chen, who is a poet as well as a policeman, is off work for a few weeks doing a literature course, leaving Detective Yu in charge when their team is handed the case after the second murder, but he is soon drawn into the case. Both Chen's girlfriend White Flower and Yu's wife Peiqin help out unofficially, with White Flower researching Mandarin dresses while Peiqin finds out about the lives of the 'three-accompanying girls' (a euphemism for prostitutes) via her contacts in the restaurant trade.

It makes a nice change to read a murder-mystery set in such a different culture. show less

On a cold morning late in the year the body of a young woman has been found on the safety island in the middle of a busy Shanghai road. Worker Master Huang sees her first as he jogs in the early morning. His mind had been occupied by the changes around him, particularly the substitution of a Starbucks for a former Worker and Farmer eatery where the food was cheap and tasty intended for the working class. Now the vistas are filled with mansions owned by what are known as the Big Bucks, the new wealthy class. Huang mutters the slogan “Socialist China gone to the capitalist dogs “ as he reflects on the changes he has seen in his seventy years.

The young woman is found wearing no more than a red mandarin dress, with the bosom unbuttoned show more and the side slits ripped and torn. She is posed in a way to suggest that the killer had molested her and that the motive was sexual. Inspector Cao Chen is engaged on a case of real estate corruption and at the same time he is trying to pursue his literature studies. The case is turned over to Detective Yu Guangming who is Chen’s partner.
t takes some time to identify the victim and everybody is startled when a second young woman is found dumped and displayed in a similar fashion. A serial killer is the first one of his kind in Shanghai and the public is stirred by the loss of two women in their flowering age.

Chen and Yu work frantically trying to understand the significance of the dress, the victims and the sites where the bodies were dumped. In this story the historical background add tremendously to the depth of the story and all the threads come together beautifully. show less

This is the fifth volume of the Inspector Chen series. As so often, I started in the middle of a series. A couple of years ago, I've already read volume six. It will probably be time to read the next time band one.
The story takes place in Shanghai. Chief Inspector Chen devotes himself to the time of Chinese literature and leaves his crew in charge, but without him, it does not go. As with the last book I read, I learned a lot about Chinese history before, during and after the revolution. Prostitution is forbidden, but under the cover of a kind of escort service everything is possible for paying guests. Weekly, murdered women are found wearing a traditional red mandarin dress. For Shanghai the first serial killer case. While Chen's team show more is determined in all directions, Chen is more likely to hit the right track by chance.
Of course the tradition of Chinese food is of great importance. Great dishes are served according to old tradition, which we would not eat in part.
I like this kind of crime in a foreign culture. show less