Chris West's Death of a Blue Lantern touches a lot of bases in modern China. Written not long after Tiananmen (June 1989), our police detective hero—Wang Anzhuang—manages to encounter something of every important aspect of modern Chinese culture.
In common with several other police detective novels in our collection. Wang Anzhuang works for truth, justice, and the Chinese way. We see countless examples of corruption working within Chinese society (I especially loved the vignette where a couple foreign "backpackers" were sitting dejectedly in a hotel lobby told that there were no rooms available and not understanding that one must pay for the privilege of renting a room). But, as with the other successful such mysteries, our hero and a small band of sympathizers have only the vision of what their country should be, not of what it might be at present.
The novel is well written. I especially like the technique of sections devoted to the activities of each of the several characters in turn, where the reader gets to put all these separate activities together to understand what is happening with the story.
The mystery is well concealed until the end, but the novel doesn't need that technique to get you to turn the pages. We have just right amount of "human interest"—Inspector Wang has the usual romantic tragedy in his life, and he is a mentor to a young cop who needs some guidance—and lots of action.
We travel a fair amount. Based in Beijing, Inspector has to go to Shanghai for awhile, then down to Guangzhou (Canton), just across the border from Hong Kong, which had not become part of China at that time. At least one of the Hong Kong residents expressed a desire to form a relationship with a PRC official, to ensure her well-being after the change-over to Chinese ownership before the turn of the century. She needn't have worried. I've visited Hong Kong as recently as 2006, and the Chinese are working as hard to keep "Chinese" out of Hong Kong—from the inside—as they used to keep them from crossing the border when HK was under British rule.
Asia, and China especially, is in a period of great change, and a wise, observant novel like this one provides a permanent record of a particular phase of those changes.
Struggle on, Comrade Wang Anzhuang...
--Michael Broschat, Feb 2009