There’s something about old Hong Kong and Shanghai that lend themselves to ghost stories and mysteries. They share a similar history during World War II as well as traditions like the Tomb Sweeping and Hungry Ghost Festivals that honour the dead. The two cities are also known for stately old colonial homes, many of which still remain today. After Kristen Loesch lived in Hong Kong 15-20 years ago, she learned of Dragon Lodge, an abandoned old home on the Peak rumored to be haunted, and formed the story that would become her new novel, The Hong Kong Widow, an engaging ghost story that alternates between wartime Shanghai, 1950s Hong Kong, and present-day US and Hong Kong. To add an extra touch to this chilling story, Hong Kong artist Jiksun Cheung’s illustrations are scattered throughout the story.
Mystery
Harini Nagendra brings the vibrancy of 1920s India to life in the “Bangalore Detectives Club” series, tightly-plotted mysteries interweaving themes of colonialism, women’s empowerment and the environment. In the latest, Into the Leopard’s Den, her fearless sleuth Kaveri Murthy—now pregnant with her first child—travels to the verdant forests and sprawling coffee plantations of Coorg to investigate a murder.
At a demolition site in modern-day Osaka, workers unearth an old air raid shelter, sealed for decades. Inside, Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr, The Tragedy of the Funatomi by Yu Aoi, and other classic mystery novels are wrapped in a faded cloth, embroidered with “House of Omari” and the merchant’s long-forgotten temari-ball logo. Once the glamorous face of the cosmetics industry, the Omari family saw their fortunes decline with the onset of the second world war—and then the murders begin.
A family has gathered in a mansion to discuss the inheritance of a wealthy grandfather’s estate. It is a familiar mystery setup, and one that risks cliché, but Yasuhiko Nishizawa takes it into exciting new territory in The Man Who Died Seven Times. Nearly the whole story occurs within a single repeating day, much like the time-looping premise of the classic film Groundhog Day. Faced with his grandfather’s murder, the protagonist must sort out the nature of the crime (and try to prevent it) by altering the course of that day’s events.
Horace Yang, a downtrodden office worker haunted by failure, betrayal, and brutal imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution, has finally found a way to settle the score. Obsessed with revenge, he presses on to a confrontation that can only end in death.
The island of Sri Lanka resembles a teardrop, also the title of Sue Amos’s latest novel, set in 1953 when the country was still called Ceylon. Teardrop is a murder mystery that weaves in both folklore and the beauty of the island.
Seicho Matsumoto was one of Japan’s most celebrated mystery writers —with two dozen novels to his name from the late 1950s, at a time when Japan was rebuilding after the war until just before his death in 1992—but only in recent years his work has been translated into English. Point Zero, translated by Louise Heal Kawai, is one of his early novels. The story, set in 1958 and the first part of 1959, takes place mainly in Tokyo and the western port city of Kanazawa and is defined by both the hope of the new era and the agonies of war.
It’s the Australian Mystery Writers’ Festival and debut author Ernest Cunningham is one of the participating writers. Cunningham arrives at the festival—hosted on the Ghan, the famous train that goes from Darwin to Adelaide—following the publication of his memoir Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (also, the title of author Benjamin Stevenson’s novel that first introduces Cunningham) and is, having signed a six-figure advance, now stuck trying to find an idea for a novel.
Edogawa Rampo (or Ranpo) was one of the most prolific Japanese mystery and crime writers of a century or so ago, and his work has remained in the public eye, whether in Japanese film, manga, video games, or translations. Born Taro Hirai, in 1923 he made his literary debut under a pen name chosen in homage to his literary hero, Edgar Allan Poe. He went on to write dozens of novels, novellas and short stories.
Art imitating life, or is it the other way around? Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character so popular and ubiquitous in popular culture that he almost seems real; many, indeed, have thought him so. Samuel L Clements, by contrast, was a real man so flamboyant, omnipresent and iconic that he can seem almost fictional, a character far better known, of course, by an entirely fictional name: Mark Twain. Anuradha Kumar’s interleaving of fact and fiction in her recent “Bombay mystery”, The Kidnapping of Mark Twain, seems somehow fitting.
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