There has been a boom recently of crime novels set in China. Peter May, a television script writer, has made a name for himself with a series of bestsellers starting with The Firemaker, after making annual trips to Beijing and Shanghai to understand the society. He ended up being inducted into the Chinese Crime Writers’ Association and wrote a column for a Chinese police magazine. On the Chinese side, writers like He Jiahong and A Yi have become bestsellers around the world after being picked up and translated by Western publishers.
Novelist Zhou Haohui Photo: Supplied/ Liu Lei
Death Notice by Zhou Haohui is the latest in this sub-genre of Chinese crime thrillers. It stars a haunted cop and a vigilante who wreaks vengeance on the criminal, the corrupt and the crooked in the city of Chengdu.
The genial-looking, bespectacled Zhou Haohui began writing when he was bored of teaching engineering at a Beijing University and began to publish novels online. A trilogy, of which Death Notice is the first, went into print selling over a million copies in China. But Zhou attained cult status when a serial of the novels played on a Chinese streaming site. It was watched more than 2 billion times. A movie, Death Notify, is now underway in Hong Kong directed by prolific action director, Herman Yau. In China, his novels reach the proportions of a new book by Jo “The Snowman” Nesbo or Stieg “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” Larsson.
His journey to the West came when publisher Doubleday in the US opted to publish Death Notice and plans to follow with the rest of the trilogy soon.
In an interview with Xinhua news agency publisher Nicolas Cheetham said he believed that a good story, “helped by good translation, can transcend national borders and win the hearts of global readers….the most important thing about a translation is that it shouldn't read like a translation. So you need, first and foremost, a good translator."
Zhou has a good translator and enough twists and turns to transcend Chinese borders.
The novel opens with the return of killer, Eumenides, named for the Greek furies of vengeance. Some 18 years earlier, Eumenides had killed the vice commissioner of Chengdu police, leaving a Death Notice naming his crimes, taking bribes, corruption and collusion with organised crime, and the date of death. Now he is back, covering his trail and serving a dozen new death notices for people he considers criminal and beyond the law.
Death Notice is the new novel by Zhou Haohui Photo: Supplied
A Police Task Force is set up and, inevitably for a crime thriller, the main protagonists have pasts. There is Captain Pei Tao, a brilliant detective whose Police College sweetheart was murdered in the earlier killing. Initially a suspect, he was banished to police a small provincial town but remained hellbent on catching Eumenides. There’s Mu Jianyun, the beautiful police psychologist. And Captain Han Hao, the gruff committed Chengdu cop who is still getting over losing his friend and police partner in an unusual shootout with robbers.
So far, so police procedural.
What marks Zhou out as special is his grasp of set pieces and the twists and turns needed to keep readers interested. In one scene, a squad of undercover police trying to guard a marked victim in the middle of Chengdu’s central square are overrun by identically dressed job seekers sent by the killer. It is a cleverly constructed plot twist and cleverly written scene.
As with most crime thrillers, describing the intricacies of the plot will only spoil the surprise of the book, but rest assured they are enjoyably brutal, satisfying and resonate with the plot.
A thriller with Chinese characteristics
The interesting question, though, for a novel like Death Notice is whether it is a crime novel which happens to be set in China, or is there a Chineseness to the book. In other words, is Zhou’s book a thriller with “Chinese characteristics”, as they say in China’s politics?
Reviewers have picked up on a few sly pokes at China and the thriller genre.
Mu cocked her head. “Couldn’t he just kill her from a distance? You know, with a long-range rifle?”
“A sniper rifle?” Yin squinted. “Where do you think we are, Washington DC? Not even our department has that kind of equipment.”
The novel swoops from the mega-rich of in the penthouse of Chengdu’s skyscrapers to the dirt poor in Cockroach Alley. It does deal topically with corruption, one of the biggest issues facing China and Premier Xi Jinping now. Xi’s repeated anti-corruption campaigns have seen more than 1.5 million corrupt Communist Party officials rounded up, charged and dismissed in the last five years, as well as many others outside the Party. But, equally, captains Han and Pei, as well as the rest of the Police Task force are portrayed as generally admirable, incorruptible and, largely, trying to do their best for the citizens of Chengdu by catching Eumenides. They might be scarred but they are a virtuous bunch, a model of trusted authority figures.
There is also not much description that creates a picture of Chengdu, although few crime novels do paint the scene extensively. Crime great Elmore Leonard advised in his 10 rules of writing, not to “go into great detail describing places and things, unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language.” Zhou has learned the lesson well, so anyone looking for descriptions of Chengdu, fast rising as a city to visit for tourists to China, will find little.
Having said all that, Death Notice is a fun read. Entertaining, beguiling, satisfyingly twisted and fast-paced enough to satisfy thriller lovers. And it is worth checking out as a part of a wave of Chinese crime writers making their name in the genre.
