Diversity, even—or perhaps especially—Asian diversity, in crime novels and dramatizations is of course nothing new: Inspector Ganesh Ghote first appeared in 1964; Priyanka Chopra debuted in Quantico in 2015. But, mirroring the real world, there is now diversity within the diversity. Bloody Foreigners, Neil Humphreys’s latest “Inspector Low” novel, this time has the bipolar Singapore detective being called upon by London’s Detective Inspector Ramila Mistry to help with the murder of moonlighting Singapore student Mohamed Kamal in Chinatown. 

Humphreys goes for the jugular, not quite literally but almost, from the opening lines.

Mohamed Kamal knew he was dying. The puddle told him. He was sitting in his own blood … Kamal watched his killer take the bloody knife and scrawl four capital letters into the Victorian brickwork. MEGA …

“MEGA”, as in—you’ve probably guessed it—“Make England Great Again”.

One needn’t have read earlier Inspector Low books to enjoy Bloody Foreigners (which is just as well, because I hadn’t). The earlier titles (at least the two I counted) are set in Humphreys’s erstwhile hometown of Singapore; in Bloody Foreigners, the geography is London—Charing Cross, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Altab Ali Park—and there is thus no need to know one’s Raffles from one’s Changi or Orchard Road, a boon, one imagines, for the British publisher’s domestic readership.

Stanley Low is in London more or less in exile: his “wonderful government has sent me here to give some really boring lectures on criminology at the London School of Economics.” When Kamal is found stabbed, Mistry, who knew Low from a previous sojourn of his in London (rather more than “knew”, it becomes clear) and since he just happens to be in town, asks him to “consult”. Low gets rather more involved than that.

Humphreys tells a good yarn. The plot has numerous ins and outs, twists, turns and dead-ends. There’s a smooth white supremicist villain, a couple of talk-radio personalities, and various others supporting characters. The leads are fleshed out: Stanley Low is bloody-minded and obstreperous. Mistry is purposeful and determined; her father (as, we are told, Gujaratis do) runs a corner shop Mini-Mart; she’s married to a white policeman (whom she outranks). Mistry sure seems like she was created with a TV series in mind.

If the book has a drawback, it’s the relatively minor one that the politics—and the white supremacists’ Winston Churchill fetish—are a bit too obvious to be quite as sinister as they might have been. But that doesn’t really get in the way of either the plot or descriptive language. Humphreys, known as a satirist, is here somewhat restrained. On his arrival in London,

Stanley Low stared at the carpet. An airport’s carpet defined its country. Fourteen hours earlier, he’d left Changi Airport’s carpet. It was new, vibrant, clean and sanitised. The carpet was the work of Asian hands, designed in an Asian country and maintained by migrant labour.

      That was Singapore.

      The carpet at Heathrow Airport was faded and frayed; once bright and confident, it was now coming away at the edges. Attempts had obviously been made to cover the corners and hide the decay.

      This was England.

Bloody Foreigners inverts the trope of the troubled, world-weary Western policeman fighting triads and collusion in the far reaches of Britain’s erstwhile empire. One is left with the feeling that here it’s Britain, not Singapore, that is the exotic, quaintly run-down, third-world country.

Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.