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Soho Press

DEATH OF A RED HEROINE

Qiu Xiaolong

Soho is pleased to introduce a first novel in a new series featuring Inspector Chen Cao, a poet and translator of T.S. Eliot. He has been assigned to head the Shanghai Police Bureau’s Special Case Squad, and to investigate the murder of Guan Hongying, a National Model Worker. Her reputation was that of a celebrity with integrity, but if Chen finds compromise in her personal life, is it wise to bring this information to light?

In contemporary China, politics dictate most personal decisions, and the new capitalists are on the rise. Chen’s own romantic choices have consequences that could jeopardize his career. But if he is to persevere in his investigation, he will have to seek the influence of a former girlfriend from Beijing, whose high social position precluded their relationship. What will he decide?

Qiu Xiaolong was born in Shanghai and was a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association. He published over ten books of translation (including the works of T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats), poetry and criticism in Chinese. He came to the United States in 1988 with a fellowship from the Ford Foundation. After the events in Tianenmen Square he decided not to return, and brought his wife over to America. He received his MA and Ph.D. at Washington University. Since 1994 Prof. Qiu has taught Chinese and Chinese Literature in the Comparative Literature Department at Washington University in St. Louis where he lives with his wife and daughter. His work has appeared literary journals and a number of anthologies. His awards include the Missouri Biennial Award, Prairie Schooner Reader’s Choice Award, and a residency at Yaddo. DEATH OF A RED HEROINE is based upon real events that occurred in Shanghai.

Mystery 1-56947-193-2 $25.00 5 1/2 X 8 480 pages

PRAISE FOR QIU XIAOLONG’S

DEATH OF A RED HEROINE

“Poet and translator Qiu Xiaolong makes a brilliant debut in fiction with his Shanghai investigator Chen (a poet, translator and police inspector). Using the structure of a procedural murder mystery, the author offers us a rich and authentic immersion in the daily life of a large group of citizens in. One is torn between rushing on to discover the who and why of the murder, and in lingering sensuously over the lines of poetry that enrich Inspector Chen’s meditations or over the snacks and feasts that he and his sidekick Yu snatch or savor. I cannot imagine any readers, including fellow whodunit addicts, who would want to miss.” --Mona Van Duyn, U.S. Poet Laureate, 1992-3

“...the wonderful and complex Inspector Chen Cao, the ever impecunious, couplet-quoting poet of the Shanghai Police Bureau. A wonderful, many-faceted gem of a book!” --William Marshall, the Yellowthread Mystery series

“In DEATH OF A RED HEROINE China is not only the setting; it is a major player. The novel is alive with the details of Shanghai in 1990. But as one progresses through the novel Qiu deftly leads the reader to the creepy realization that the background is politically alive and functioning: the 1989 demonstrations, their bloody suppression, and the Party’s attempts to recoup political legitimacy thereafter form the real setting for this mystery and casts a dark shadow over every step in its resolution. Raw, naked power is at the core of both the murder and its investigation, but its manifestations are anything but predictable in this splendid first work. I look forward to more in what I hope will be a series of mysteries surrounding Chen and his able assistant.” --Robert E. Hegel, Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature, Washington University

Author’s Notes

Qiu Xiaolong

I was born in Shanghai, China, during the dragon year in the Chinese lunar calendar. That was probably why my parents named me Xiaolong, which means ‘little dragon’, which is an auspicious name in China. In 1966, while I was still in elementary school, the Cultural Revolution broke out. My father, a capitalist, became a popular a target for revolutionary criticism and while hospitalized for eye surgery, he had to stand blindfolded for hours beneath a portrait of Chairman Mao, acknowledging his guilt . I had to hold him up to keep him from collapsing. They called me a ‘snake monster’s kid’. It was an experience which instilled in me a drive to seek indelible images through writing.

Soon after, the government began sending educated youths to the countryside to receive reeducation from the poor and lower middle class peasants. I was exempt because of bronchitis, but for several years I remained ‘waiting for assignment’--out of school, out of work. From boredom, I went to the Bridge Park to practice Taiji, but ended up studying English on a bench by the Huangpu River. The only textbook in school had been Quotations from Chairman Mao, so I felt extremely lucky eventually to be able to read my first English novel, Random Harvest, as the big clock on the Bund chimed out the hours.

With the end of the Cultural revolution in 1976, another dragon year, I entered the East China Normal University, and then the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, majoring in English and American Literature. I started writing poems, was selected for membership in the Chinese Writers’ Association, and won several national awards. I wrote my thesis on T.S. Eliot for my M.A. In addition to poetry, I published a number of translations, including a selection of Eliot’s poems, which turned out to be so popular that someone had it publicly displayed as part of her dowry--a symbol of modernity.

In 1986 I came to the United States as a member of China’s delegation to the Third American and Chinese Writers’ Conference, and returned in 1988 as a Ford Foundation Fellow for one year’s stay at Washington University in St. Louis. I chose that university because it had been founded by Eliot’s grandfather. What happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989, however, changed my plans. After selling baskets of egg rolls in a charity booth at the St. Louis VP fair, I heard my name mentioned on the Voice of America as a published poet who supported the democratic movement in China. That made it risky for me to return home so I stayed on and received my degree in Comparative Literature, and then my Ph. D. In the meantime, I continued writing poems in both English and Chinese, shifting into English, as I could not publish in China.

Since then, I have had opportunities to go back to China frequently. The dramatic changes there inspired me to try my hand at some genre other than poetry. While on a business trip I began to write Death of a Red Heroine in the Shanghai Hotel. My hobby reading mysteries has been a great help in my first effort to write a mystery, providing a necessary frame for my material, as my wife and daughter provide a frame for my life in the United States. Of course, they are my contents, too.