I’ve been spotting opium references in popular culture with interest for quite a few years now (2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 & 2012) about just how opium keeps on fascinating us.
So first off, some novels. Tom Bradby’s Yesterday’s Spy finds a link to opium smuggling in contemporary Tehran. There’s a lot of morphine and opium floating around 1930s Birmingham in Natalie Marlow’s great read, Needless Alley.
And some non-fiction…Gabrielle Paluch’s The Opium Queen, the true story of the widely mythologized genderqueer Burmese opium-pioneer of noble Chinese descent, Olive Yang, who secretly ran an anti-communist rebel army supported by the CIA in the 1950s heyday of the Golden Triangle. Following his Ibis trilogy on the Canton opium trade Amitav Ghosh published Smoke and Ashes (out in February 2024 in the UK) subtitled A Writers Jounrey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories.
On the bg screen Florence Pugh was on the laundanum to ease the pain of child loss, husband loss and nursing in the Crimean War in The Wonder, based on Emma Donahughe’s book. And, on the small screen, I’ve been catching up with the period crime series Miss Scarlet and the Duke where (in series 2, episode 2) young copper Oliver Fitzroy is dragged out of an East End opium den in Victorian London by his boss.
Ming Ho’s new dramatisation of Han Suyin’s landmark semi-autobiographical novel for BBC Radio 4.
The story follows Suyin, a doctor and writer, living and working in late 1940s Hong Kong. When Suyin meets British war reporter Mark, she embarks on a secret love affair that tests her relationship to her own Eurasian identity and divided loyalties. With a fierce sense of duty to China, and a difficult past, Suyin is forced to ask if their relationship could really survive outside of Hong Kong. And at what cost?
Originally published in 1952, this is a story of two societies on the cusp of change – colonial Hong Kong and feudal, revolutionary China – in a fresh adaptation for BBC Radio 4.
As broadcast on RTHK3 on Christmas Day 2023, Paul French reads an eyewitness account of the biggest fire Hong Kong has ever seen, which destroyed Mid-Levels 145 years ago to that day. This is an excerpt from his edition ofWanderings in China: Hong Kong and Canton, Christmas and New Year, 1878/1879 by Constance Gordon-Cumming, published by Blacksmith Books.
An interesting book being sold by the charming Endlings store in Hastings Old Town – see endlings.hastings on Instagram.
Timur and his Comrades by A Gaider and cover design by Donia Nachsen, translated by Maria Renbourn. Set in 1929 when the warlord Chang Hsueh-liang (Zhang Xueliang) starfted a skirmish with the Soviet Far Eastern Red Army on the Manchurian border. From a Russian book series published by Pilot Press in 1943, a Soviet front publishing house in London.
DCI John Creighton of the Shanghai Municipal Police is back for a Christmas mystery in the South China Morning Post – It’s Christmas Eve in Shanghai in 1930 & a mysterious guest has accepted an invitation to the Carmichaels’ annual drinks party in their beautiful art-deco apartment. Soon a gunshot rings out…
Last year (2022) the South China Morning Post weekend magazine published my short story – Murder on the Shanghai Express (click here) – in their Christmas issue. Shanghai Municipal Police Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) John Creighton is eager to get home from Peking having delivered a prisoner. He takes the Christmas Eve Shanghai Express home only to find himself trapped in a snowdrift and with a murdered man in the First Class Observation Car….
And this year (on December 17th to be precise) DCI Creighton is back in the pages of the Post magazine Christmas edition. It’s a year later, 1930, and all John Creighton wants is to get home in the Christmas Eve snow to his log fire and family dinner. But a chance encounter with an old colleague on the way sees him involved in another Christmas mystery…
Located in downtown Porto, the Carmo and Carmelitas churches have a trio of nice 18th century Portuguese made Chinoiserie grandfather clocks in cut and turned wood and with laquered fronts…
Jeffrey Kinkley’s China Mysteries (University of Hawaii Press) is a neat summation of much of the crime fiction featuring China by writers overseas (by Chinese and foreign authors) set in contemporary (ish) China. Big names like Qiu Xiaolong, Peter May and others as well as reminding me that writers who have moved on from crime, like Lisa See, also write some great procedurals while some, like Cathy Sampson, stopped too soon. Not sure there’s any great conclusions fo be drawn, but it’s a handy overview and prompts a few ‘must rereads’. Out end of December 2023.
With the 1989 Beijing massacre fading from popular memory in the West, China from the mid-1990s to a few years ago felt more open than ever to global trade, communication, travel, and cultural and educational exchanges. There was even talk in the mainstream press that China was heading toward a more democratic future. It was during this second Sino-Western honeymoon that authors in the US, Canada, France, the UK, and elsewhere began writing mystery fiction set in contemporary China in their regional languages. These “China mysteries”—crime, detective, and mystery thriller novels that take place in China but were not written or published there—formed a new genre of popular fiction that highlighted the world’s hopes and fears after Tiananmen. The multinational and multicultural writers of China mysteries, among them ex-PRC nationals like Qiu Xiaolong, Zhang Xinxin, and Diane Wei Liang, converged on the China Mainland to negotiate political and cultural complexities through crime fiction plotlines. Their books emerged from Western lineages of the modern novel and popular genre fiction—with Chinese contributions—and depended on Western commercial publishing models shaped by cultural, national, political, and economic factors.
This work examines more than a hundred China mysteries—many describing and analyzing social and economic changes at the center of modern life in China—to provide a brief history of the genre and analyze the formulaic and original elements of the mysteries, including their attention to matters of location, social content, characterization, history, and biography. It also highlights the role of “information” acquisition as a motivation for readers and authors of popular fiction, which has become a topic of discussion in Chinese literature studies.
With its timely commentary on Sino-Western relations as presented through crime fiction, China Mysteries will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary Chinese literature and culture, as well as fans of crime novels and others who are curious about the global dimensions of the genre and how it complicates our understanding of “world literature.”
