Regular marked price: $24.95Discount Price: $16.47
Cost Savings: $8.48 (34%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780312371074
ISBN number: 0312371071
Label: St. Martin's Minotaur
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Minotaur
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: November 27, 2007
Publishing house: St. Martin's Minotaur
Release Date: November 27, 2007
Sale Popularity Level: 101174
Studio: St. Martin's Minotaur
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Department is often put in charge of politically sensitive cases. Having recently ruffled more than a few official feathers, when he is asked to look into a sensitive corruption case he takes immediate action - he goes on leave from work. But while on vacation, the body of a murdered young woman is found in a highly trafficked area and the only notable aspect is that she was redressed in a blue mandarin dress. When a second body appears, this time in the People's Park, also in precisely the same kind of blue mandarin dress, the newspapers start screaming that Shanghai is being stalked by its very first sexual serial killer. With the Party anxious to resolve the murders quickly, Chen finds himself in the midst of his most potentially dangerous and sensitive case to date.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
Inspector Chen, hero of Qiu Xiaolong's novel Red Mandarin Dress, has a weak stomach. He does not like the odd delicacies offered at receptions and traditional Chinese restaurants, such as live boiled turtle soup and live braised monkey's brain. However, to trap his suspect into a confession, he sets up a horrible banquet with "cruel food", dishes to make even the greatest gourmand squirm. He toys with the suspect, stage-managing the scene, and finally revealing the strange and shocking truth.
AN INSECURE BUT SUCCESSFUL SLEUTH
Chen is a mesmerising sleuth. He is insecure, self-indulgent and prone to symptoms of anxiety. He likes poetry and literary analysis and his police department colleagues cannot quite understand him. "Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau was startled out of his dream by an early phone call...He had stayed up late last night night writing a letter to a friend in Beijing, quoting a Tang dynasty poet, to say what he found difficult to say in his own words." (5) But he is also kind-hearted, highly observant, intuitive, persistent and clever. No reader of a mystery can ask for more, other than a gripping plot and dramatic denouement, which the novel does possess.
MURDERS ON A CLASSICAL THEME
Red Mandarin Dress is the fifth Inspector Chen novel, all of which are set in present day Shanghai. A pretty girl is found dead, wearing nothing but a blue cheongsam , a classical mandarin dress. These used to be worn by high society women and were made of silk, with small buttons, a high collar and a slit high up the thigh. While the police are tracing the identity of victim no. 1, another girl is found dead in the same type of dress, and then another. Fearing a serial killer is roaming the city, Inspector Chen is specially commissioned to trace the murderer.
As he follows the leads, the reader is taken into the hidden neighbourhoods, old buildings and traditional venues of old Shanghai, and the brothels, bars and restaurants owned by the nouveau riche of modern Shanghai. "Peng - nicknamed the Number One Shanghai Big Buck - was one of the earliest and most successful developers. Since party officials determined land price and allocation, corruption swarmed around like flies chasing blood."(6)
The clue to the mystery is the cheongsam dresses worn by the victims. This is one element which makes the novel idiosyncratically Chinese. Another is the pervasive party politics - Inspector Chen and his Department cannot make a move without the involvement of high-ranking party officials and informants. "That particular committee, a new institution under the Shanghai People's Congress, exercised no direct authority over him, but Zhang, higher in the Party cadre rank, had never contacted him before, let alone called him at home." (5)
PLOTTING AROUND POLITICS AND REVOLUTION
The plot is as much a political game as it is a game of hide-and-seek. Chen does not veer away from calamitous political events in China's history, such as the Cultural Revolution. Today, the Cultural Revolution is seen by most people inside and outside China, including the Communist Party of China and Chinese democracy movement supporters, as an unmitigated disaster, and as an event to be avoided in the future. Authors may avoid writing about shameful episodes in the histories of nations - especially when penning a jolly good thriller - since it could be seen as unfashionable, unpalatable and possibly even politically incorrect. Not so Qiu Xiaolong, who subtly and movingly connects his characters to the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Qiu suggests that the unwillingness to remember and commemorate this tragedy may result in repressed thoughts of revenge that could manifest themselves in murder.
The author's descriptions of the Cultural Revolution and the fear, humiliation and persecution that most Chinese experienced during that time has a personal foundation. The novel is dedicated to Qiu's "...elder brother, Xiaowei - but for luck, what happened to him during the Cultural Revolution could have happened to me."
CRUEL FOOD AND CULTURE
Another recurring theme is that of traditional cuisine, interwoven with the theme of classical Chinese literature and philosophy, subjects that were outlawed during the Cultural Revolution. "On his way there, a bought a Jinhua ham wrapped in the special tung paper, following a tradition as early as Confucius's time."(9) Chen, a former student of English literature, embarks on an MA programme in Classical Chinese literature as an excuse to escape being assigned an awkward case. His very first study is on the theme of "thirsty illness" in Tang Dynasty poetry. Researching his paper, Chen - and the reader - come to understand the link between romantic love, obsession and the killer's thirst for revenge.
Red Mandarin Dress is not "un-put-down-able" but it is a gripping, quick read. The images which Qiu Xiaolong creates stay ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
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 blue mandarin dress plot at the center of this latest thriller is seductive, disturbing and entertaining all at the same time. A great novel!
Rated by buyers 
-
The Red Mandarin Dress is the fifth book in the Inspector Chen series and Xiaolong returns to the story and plot which made the very first in the series such a good read. However, that very 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 very first serial killer. This series might be an acquired taste but I know I will be picking up the subsequent 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 subsequent case for Inspector Chen.
Rated by buyers 
-
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 blue 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 very 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 very 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 blue 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.
Rated by buyers 
-
It's regrettable that Qiu Xiaolong ran out of credible plots two novels back, and started to substitute melodrama and sensationalism instead. Chen Cao was once a credible, and even likeable, character, but seems to have become an excuse for poorly contrived soap operas rather than detective novels with any convincing or challenging features. These last two novels have read like a badly written guide to recent Chinese history, mediocre cuisine, and the nasty habits of the Chinese entrepreneurial class. Too often, the "information" provided is gratuitous, does not move the plot forward, and leaves a sour taste in the mouth. A case in point is the live monkey brain dish that Qiu introduces in Red Mandarin Dress. Other than being revolting, it does nothing to advance the plot forward, and suggests an author who simply does not know how to construct an exciting mystery. Chen's conversations are increasingly pedantic monologues, while his insight into the Chinese femme fatale is so massively cliched that it is a joke to suggest that Chen is any sort of scholar. I'd suggest reading the very first two novels in the series, and then forgetting the rest. Don't waste time on a writer who is peddling exotic Chinese soap operas rather than worthwhile, intelligent fiction.
Find other books like this one:
