Becoming Inspector Chen

Starred review from January 4, 2021
Qiu deepens his Dalgliesh-like series lead in his superior 11th novel featuring Shanghai policeman and poet Chen Cao (after 2020’s Hold Your Breath, China). Chen’s latest investigation embarrassed the Beijing Communist Party leadership, and he’s fallen out of favor. Despite suspecting that he’ll soon lose his chief inspector position, Chen’s curious about a new case involving an anti-party poem posted on the country’s most popular social media platform, which reminds him of a previous inquiry. Flashbacks detail Chen’s first case, which centers on an old gourmet’s murder and involves “a piece of blood-speckled gauze, and a gray lizard with a strange name he failed to recollect.” That intriguing plotline is enhanced by an account of Chen’s painful childhood as the son of an academic deemed hostile to Mao’s regime and the events that led to Chen’s joining the Shanghai PD. While series fans will be delighted at the background Qiu provides, this is an accessible starting point for newcomers interested in a dogged, honest cop who must battle his own government to do his job.

December 15, 2020
Reinvigorated by a baffling murder puzzle, a veteran Chinese detective contemplates his past. The title of Inspector Chen's 11th case has a sly double meaning, introducing both a deep dive into the literary detective's early life and an unexpected professional resurgence late in his career. On the verge of retirement and relegated to a peripheral post in the Shanghai Police Bureau, Chen reflects on the early years of his career and recalls his childhood in the 1960s amid the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. "Little Chen" is a budding man of letters who finds inspiration in a forbidden copy of Doctor Zhivago. He grows up just a few blocks away from the infamous Red Dust Lane. His literary career begins in the 1970s, as a poet and translator. Series fans will be rewarded by another elegant mix of recent history and literary embellishments and a richer Chen backstory, though newcomers may be impatient. In the present, Chen has earned the disfavor of Party Secretary Li, who orders him to translate an American police procedural booklet and freezes him out of important investigations. Chen is still writing poetry and translating The Unbearable Lightness of Being when a murder case involving Red Dust Lane piques his interest. He can't resist circumventing Detective Ding, the arrogant young colleague in charge of the probe, to question witnesses in the death of Mr. Fu, an eccentric elderly widower. As Chen makes strides, Ding can only grumble. Though Chen unearths a handful of suspects, the vengeful police focus only on an ex-Red Guard member named Pei. What should Chen do? Qiu's stylish hybrid is half fictional literary memoir and half crisp whodunit.

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February 1, 2021
The Inspector Chen series follows the chief inspector of the Shanghai Police Bureau, who has a degree in English literature and is a published poet, as he navigates the perilous waters of conducting investigations without running afoul of party leaders. In this, the eleventh in the series, Chen fears he is soon to be dismissed from his post. A bizarre element of this mystery is that there is no actual investigation. Chen contemplates whether or not he should involve himself at all in the case of an anti-party poem posted on social media. The book traces the history of contemporary Chinese politics from Mao's Cultural Revolution to the present by tying this history to Chen's own life. Chen's memories of the brutalities practiced on people regarded as intellectuals under Mao, like Chen's father (a teacher), are achingly vivid. The latest Chen is both a scathing indictment of contemporary China and an explanation of how poet Chen came to be Chief Inspector Chen. Gripping, but best for longtime readers of the series.

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