Customer Reviews

Red Mandarin Dress: An Inspector Chen Novel (Inspector Chen Novels)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Red Mandarin Dress is the fifth book in the Inspector Chen series and Xiaolong returns to the story and plot which made the first in the series such a good read. However, that first book, Death of a Red Heroine is still the best in this series. None of the follow up books equals its sense of time and place and more detailed characterizations. Yet this series of books is a guilty pleasure because of the characters and staging, Shanghai in the 1990s as China transforms itself from communism and Cultural Revolution to a kind of corrupt crony capitalism. In Mandarin Dress Xiaolong seems to make the assumption you have read previous books in the series as he spends no time on character introduction and I suggest you begin by reading each in order. The big failing here again is that Xiaolong spends little time in more fully defining the various characters and letting them grow. This book is almost totally a police procedural novel with a plot (killer) the reader can guess at long before Inspector Chen solves the case. But it has always been the getting there rather than the surprise that makes these books work. Xiaolong is not a great writer as he uses sharp sentences without much nuance to move the case/plot along. Yet Chen is still such an interesting invention, here he takes a vacation to write a masters thesis in literature only to be drawn into catching Shanghai's first serial killer. This series might be an acquired taste but I know I will be picking up the next book with the hope that Chen's partner Yu, Yu's wife Peiqin and Chen's new girl friend White Cloud are more fully developed perhaps with their own story becoming a more important part of the next case for Inspector Chen.

This is the best of the series so far. It tells an interesting story and mechanically, it is the most effectively written of the Inspector Chen novels. In short: It packs a lot of plot and subplot into a neat little package.

The murder is an interesting crime with roots in the Cultural Revolution, and a sub-plot about Chen working on an MA degree folded neatly into the pursuit of the killer. The regular characters all move forward in their development, and you get a far better picture of Inspector Chen as a man trapped in a career which is is good at, but which doesn't satisfy his soul.

A few reviews of the previous books have been critical of the amount of poetry and food conversation - well, here the right balance is struck. And even the rather disturbing "live monkey brain" (or as Chen calls them - cruel dishes) plays into the plot near the end. For me, I'll stick to cashew chicken.

The only down side is that the book is read and I probably have another 12 months to wait for the next one!

I have to take exception with the 5-star reviews that have been posted. To justify my three-star review, let me go over some of the strong and weak points of the novel:

Strong points:
-Gives a very nice picture of the city of Shanghai, and more importantly, of the divide between rich and poor, capitalism and socialism, as well as giving the reader an incredibly interesting look at life in China in the late 1990's.
-The book is nicely seasoned with numerous descriptions of food, everywhere from a cheap box dinner to a banquet of delicacies, and the use of quotations from Chinese poetry (while at time distracting and seemingly pointless) often adds to the story.
-The numerous pressures on Mr. Chen and his colleagues, particularly his handling of political circumstances, and his ability to both investigate crime, deal with his literature paper, and his (possible) dealings with White Cloud are interesting to follow.

Weaknesses:
-Barely half way through the novel, the suspect becomes obvious and the mystery is essentially resolved. The last third of the book becomes quite boring and essentailly a chore to read.
-Mr. Chen's meeting with the suspect is incredibly unrealistic and far too overdone. The calling in of favors, the preparation of "cruel dishes", the use of White Cloud, etc., is all quite unnecessary and far from providing an exciting apex, is actually an exercise in tedium.
-Mr. Chen's handling of the case at the end is quite inept and a sharp contrast from his earlier (brilliant) investigation and handling of the case. It was really painful to sit through it.
-The conclusion is unsatisfying. While no one expects "sad" or "happy" endings nowadays, the way this case ended was foolish.

So, while the novel is interesting, and at a little over 300 pages a quick read (five hours or less,) I was less than impressed, particularly given the numerous five star reviews.

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, 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.

This book is more than a good read. It's psychologically intriguing and historically informative. Qui Xiaolong makes sure Inspector Chen's character never stagnates, that it changes from novel to novel. The red mandarin dress plot at the center of this latest thriller is seductive, disturbing and entertaining all at the same time. A great novel!

I have to raise a red flag on this unusual clinker in Qiu's otherwise excellent Inspector Chen series.

The plot takes forever to develop, but no matter because the solution becomes obvious to the reader several hundred pages before Inspector Chen finally figures it out.

It's usually a pleasure to visit with Qiu's characters and the Shanghai setting, but they are not as vividly drawn here as in his other novels. The Cultural Revolution background is interesting as it is introduced, but by the time it is repeated over and over and over ... well, a few too many overs.

The attempt to craft a psychological thriller in modern China is ambitious, but not a great fit. The ending is intricate, clever and fitting, but just takes too long to set up.

So enjoy the other Inspector Chen books, but give this one a pass.

This is the first of the Inspector Chen books I've read, and I hoped it would be, if nothing else, an interesting cross-cultural study with a nice plot to move things along. In both respects, I was disappointed.

I'm hoping that this was not representative of the rest of the series, and am going to go back and find the first book to see if it's better.

The premise here seems to be that crime busters are best able to do their jobs by spending their free time studying literature theory. I'll admit that literature theory isn't something I have much experience with, or interest in, but when someone like David Foster Wallace writes about it, I want to learn more. This book made it seem like a waste of time. As evidence, I cite one example from the book: Chen "discovers" that a common theme in literature is that sexually attractive women are often demonized.

Stop the presses!

But it gets worse. He receives praise from a professor for this "original idea" and is encouraged to write papers and a Master's Thesis based on this breakthrough. And you know what else? It helps him solve the mystery!

To quote Wallace, a better writer, "this is so stupid it practically drools."

Aside from that major complaint -- a failed attempt at genre bending -- there's also nothing really compelling in either the story or the presentation. Yeah, like many Chinese works, we read a lot about food, but this is one of the few that didn't make me hungry -- quite the opposite. And after reading the phrase "red mandarin dress" for the thousandth time, I wish he'd switched to the shorter, less intrusive word "qipao," which he did in fact define early in the text. As for the four murdered women, they barely rated any story at all.

I'm hoping Qiu was tired and banged this out in a hurry against deadline, and his other books are better. This one's a mess.

When a young woman is found murdered, dressed in a torn red mandarin dress, Detective Yu is not completely surprised. Perhaps, he thinks, she has fallen foul of the triads or one of the dangerous `Mr Big Bucks' who is part of the `new' Shanghai.

Inspector Chen has been lying low after a corruption investigation, and has taken on part-time studies. When a second victim is found dead in a similar dress, the possibility that a serial killer is on the loose in Shanghai has the authorities worried. Inspector Chen is pulled back to work to investigate. More murders are committed before the murderer is unmasked and the process of solving the case gives some insights into the history of modern China.

I've not read any of the earlier Inspector Chen novels and I need to if I am to understand the character more fully. While this made aspects of Inspector Chen less accessible to me, the story itself held my attention because of the historical and cultural context. I have mixed feelings about this novel: it held my interest without captivating me, but has created sufficient curiosity for me to want to read the earlier books in the series.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

This is the second book written by a modern Chinese that I've read. What was interesting about both writers' style was the descriptiveness, particularly of color. This mystery is set in modern Shanghai with some flashback to the Cultural Revolution. The take on Shanghai's development and the dissonance between the facts of life there and the fading memory of working toward a workers paradise also made for a thoughtful read. I'll have to go back and read the earlier volumes now. Page 100 had a thoughtful poem on it and others are sprinkled throughout the tome.

Bought this as a present for someone else,however I had already read the book.Features Inspector Chen,takes place in Shanghai,China.he is given cases that are politically sensitive.This book,like others by the same author shows the conflict and tension that arises between the victims of The Cultural Revolution and their opressors.While many positive changes have taken place since the Cultural Revolution these two groups of people are living side by side.As usual it starts with a discovery ( a dead body) and leads to a very involved investigation, and reveals a lot of things that are not too obvious.Along the way you larn a lot about Chinese people, and the current Chinese culture.