When Red Is Black

When Red is Black is Qiu Xiaolong's third Inspector Chen mystery and provides an insightful look into modern China.

Plot summary

Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau is taking a vacation, in part because he is annoyed at his boss, the Party Secretary Li, but also because a triad-connected businessman has made him an offer he can not refuse. For what seems to be a fortune and with no apparent strings attached (like a laptop or medical care for his mother) he is asked to translate into English a business proposal for the New World, a complex of shops and restaurants to be built in Central Shanghai evoking nostalgia for the "glitter and glamour" of the '30s.

A murder is reported: Chen is reluctant to shorten his working holiday, so Sergeant Yu is forced to take charge of the investigation. A novelist has been murdered in her room. At first it seems that only a neighbor could have committed the crime, but when someone else confesses, Detective Yu cannot believe that he is really the murderer. It is only when Chen returns and starts to investigate the past that he finds answers. And Chen also discovers how the triad has played him.

This is the third critically acclaimed Inspector Chen mystery set in post-Cultural Revolution China.

Literary review

When Red Is Black offers a complex and riveting portrait of Shanghai, a city in transition from a proletarian dictatorship to a capitalist playground where "nostalgia sells". The larger and more disquieting mystery of what will happen to dutiful workers like Detective Yu and Chief Inspector Chen as Chinese society continues to change is necessarily left unsolved.^[1]

References