Quotes of the Day

When Qiu Xiaolong was a boy in Shanghai, Red Guards loyal to Mao Zedong ransacked his parents' home. The thugs took jewelry, books and anything else associated with a bourgeois lifestyle. But they left a few photo magazines. In one, Qiu saw a picture of a woman wearing a red qipao, the form-hugging Chinese dress that became an emblem of capitalist decadence during the Cultural Revolution.

"When I first saw that picture, I was amazed by the beauty," says Qiu, now 54 years old and possessed of the pleasantly bookish air of a college professor. "It was kind of natural to conclude the people in it were from a bourgeois family background, so they must have suffered during the Cultural Revolution. I thought, What could have happened to them?"

Decades later, the stirred memory of that photo suggested the plot of Qiu's Red Mandarin Dress, the fifth and latest of his popular, Shanghai-set Inspector Chen detective novels. This time, Qiu's hero, a cop and poet, is on the trail of a serial killer who dresses his female victims in tailored qipao dresses — a macabre gesture freighted with political meaning. As in the previous books, the investigation leads Inspector Chen to a brutal legacy from the past, for even the most vicious of Qiu's criminals are victims of China's bloody history. So, incidentally, are many of the people close to the author. "My mother had a nervous breakdown at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and she never really recovered," Qiu says. "But I also have friends who suffered even worse things. I'm not saying they're dead or anything. But they're really ruined. Their life, dreams, career — gone."

Qiu's preoccupation with China's tumultuous recent past was foreordained. One of his formative experiences as an author was, after all, ghostwriting a self-criticism for his father, a businessman persecuted during the Red Guards' reign of terror. Qiu says he never set out to write Chinese crime novels. A poet and translator himself — his credits include two books of translated poetry, Treasury of Chinese Love Poems (2003) and Evoking Tang (2007), as well as a volume of his own verse, Lines Around China (2003) — Qiu permanently quit China in 1988 to study at Washington University in St. Louis, a city he chose because it was T.S. Eliot's birthplace. But in the mid-1990s, when he felt the urge to write a book about the dizzying changes taking place in his homeland, Qiu discovered that the detective novel provided the best framework for his ideas — and, not coincidentally, enabled him to write with a free hand about several issues still taboo in China.

In the course of duty, Inspector Chen has tackled political corruption (Death of a Red Heroine, 2000) and human trafficking (A Loyal Character Dancer, 2002). Qiu's 2006 mystery, A Case of Two Cities, was a virtual blueprint for the pension scandal that roiled Shanghai's highest political aeries last year and led to the resignation of the city's Communist Party chief. "A cop walks around and knocks on people's doors, asks questions," Qiu says. "It's become a convenient way to write about things I want to explore."

Qiu's novels have been published in China, but not without some mysterious changes. The city of Shanghai, for instance, is referred to as "H," which manages to sound even more Kafkaesque than anything Qiu could invent. But writing crime novels has allowed him remarkable freedom to limn China's shifting moral standards. "In the past, Chinese people believed in Confucianism," Qiu says. "That's basically an ethical system: what you should do and what you should not do. Then people believed in Mao and communism. In a way, that was also about what you should and should not do. Now it's like Nietzsche's time: God is dead. So you can do anything."

Perhaps reflecting his creator's donnish temperament, Inspector Chen is somewhat ambivalent about the door-knocking and petty politicking that go along with police work. In the course of his investigations, Qiu's hero frequently cites literary theory or quotes Tang dynasty poetry. Chen is less a cop moonlighting as a poet than a poet daylighting as a cop.

In Red Mandarin Dress, Chen has retreated further than ever from day-to-day policing, and, perhaps inevitably, the novel's crime plot often gets enjoyably lost in a thicket of Chinese history, literature and food. Yet Qiu also adeptly follows the genre's conventions and, when Inspector Chen's investigation gains momentum, the mystery of the women in the red dresses predictably returns to a buried crime from the Cultural Revolution: the sins of the nation's past revisited upon the present. Already, Qiu says, he's at work on the next novel in the series, which will be set at least partially in Beijing. For both Chen and Qiu, the mystery of China's modern social revolution remains unsolved.

• Peter Ritter