Behind That Asian Curtain

A great deal of attention has been paid to Scandinavian crime fiction making its way onto bookshelves in Britain and the United States. But there’s been a quieter, if not less important influx of English-translated Asian mysteries and thrillers. In today’s Guardian, Catherine Sampson--a UK-born author now living in Beijing, whose third and latest novel featuring journalist and single mother Robin Ballantyne is The Pool of Unease--lists her top 10 choices of Asian crime novels available in English.

She prefaces her list this way:

If you only looked at size of population, you’d expect China and India to dominate any list like this, but in fact it is Japan which has taken crime fiction to its bosom. In China, politics adds a thick layer of complication. To write about crime in China--however fictional--is to advertise the fact that Chinese society is not an entirely harmonious and benign thing. Of course, China’s leaders are a lot more tolerant than they once were when it comes to literature, but it’s still sensitive, and crime fiction is a small but growing genre. The Beijing that I see around me, with its speed-of-light economic growth, its social dislocation, its constantly migrating population and its quagmire of corruption, is a verdant pasture for crime fiction. And its political claustrophobia is the perfect environment for a private eye who is an honorable man struggling against a system that threatens to overwhelm him.

As to her actual book selections, here they are:

1. Death of a Red Heroine, by Qiu Xiaolong
2. Playing for Thrills, by Wang Shuo
3. Crime De Sang, by He Jiahong
4. Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra
5. Jack the Ladykiller, by H.R.F. Keating
6. Out, by Natsuo Kirino
7. All She Was Worth, by Miyake Miyabe
8. Inspector Imanishi Investigates, by Seicho Matsumoto
9. Murder at Mount Fuji, by Shizuko Natsuki
10. The Quiet American, by Graham Greene

Click here to read why Sampson picked these particular works.