Black Holes (2011) by He Jiahong (translated by Emily Jones)

Hong Jun is a lawyer who trained in the USA before returning home to practice in China. Xia Dahu asks him to represent his son, Zhe, who has been arrested for fraudulent stock market trading. He’d also like his help in a contract dispute with an American company.

With the assistance of his boss’ daughter and ex-wife, Zhe is released from prison on medical grounds, but manages to get himself into an even bigger mess. It will take all of Hong’s experience to save his client and his family from their actions.

The opening chapter in which Hong sets his secretary, Song Jia, a problem about which eyewitness testimony regarding a number plate is correct, had me hoping that here we had a Chinese Perry Mason and Della Street and that what would follow would be a clever courtroom mystery. Unfortunately this was the mystery highpoint of the book.

What actually followed was the story of three families and how their experiences of the Cultural Revolution were being played out in the present. Hong Jun does spring a surprise on the court but only because the police are completely inept and basic information has not been given to the reader.

That Hong Jun is one of the 100 Greatest Literary Detectives and Perry Mason is not tells you that this guide, as will have been obvious from my previous reviews, is more concerned with Literature than Detection.

Fever (1937) by Friedrich Glauser (translated by Mike Mitchell)

Sergeant Studer is one of the 100 Greatest Literary Detectives and when I read that one of his cases involved the French Foreign Legion, I decided this was the one I would try.

Studer has been staying in Paris whilst his wife has been staying with their daughter, awaiting the birth of their first grandchild. On a final night out with his French colleagues he is introduced to Father Matthias who has spent many years in Morocco as a priest to the Foreign Legionnaires:

“Strange things go on in the souls of those men; there are moving conversions of which people who think of the Foreign Legion as the dregs of humanity have no conception.”

He tells them about a corporal who had psychic turns. Recently in a trance he took on the spirit of the priest’s dead brother and threatened to kill his former wives. Father Matthias is on his way back to Switzerland to prevent the dead man from taking his revenge.

This brings backs memories for Studer who remembers that he once planned to enlist in the foreign legion after an argument with his father but hadn’t wanted to upset his mother so had remained in Switzerland and become a policeman, rising to chief inspector of the Bern City police until he was forced out after exposing a banking scandal. This caused him to begin again with the cantonal police but he did get to work with Hans Gross, author of the “Criminal Investigations” textbook, and Edouard Locard, famous in the field of forensic science for the principle that “every contact leaves a trace”.

On his return home, he finds that both women are dead, and he sets out on an investigation that will take him a long way from home and from which he may not return.

Studer has been likened to Maigret, and I can see why, but I would say he is more quixotic. His wife, in this book at least, with her interpretation of a piece of evidence, plays a much more active role in events than Madame Maigret.

It is an interesting book, not least because Studer takes more drugs than any sleuth since Sherlock Holmes, but it must say something about the lack of puzzle plots in German crime fiction that their awards are named after Friedrich Glauser. I’d read another one if I found it secondhand but I doubt I’d buy any more new.