THE MURDER OF MR. MA

Nee and Rozan unfold a tale in which Mr. Ma is only the first of many casualties in 1924 London.

Shortly after the philosopher Bertrand Russell introduces Judge Dee Ren Jie to University of London lecturer Lao She, who is to become the judge’s Watson, Ma Ze Ren, who survived the Great War as part of the Chinese Labour Corps and then opened a London shop selling Chinese antiquities, is fatally stabbed with a butterfly sword. Judge Dee swings decorously into action, questioning first Ma’s longtime customer Colonel Livingstone Moore and then American poet Ezra Pound and his equally disdainful English friend, Viscount Whytecliff, and turning young pickpocket Jim Finney, aka Jimmy Fingers, into an informant. But his investigation comes too late to save dockworker Ching Pan Lu, another veteran of the Chinese Labour Corps, who’s found dead of a similar wound. Any suspicions of coincidence are laid to rest by a third murder, then a fourth. Judge Dee, though fighting his addiction to opium, manages to come up with a plausible reason why so many members of the battalion have met sudden deaths and to excel in the bouts of martial arts in which so many scenes of conflict end. Lao She, no slouch in these ritual battles, proves an able amanuensis except for the many times he apologetically interrupts himself to allow the story to shift back to Judge Dee’s perspective. The effects are unsettling, but not nearly as much as all those fisticuffs among gentlemen who really ought to know better.

First of a series that’s acutely attuned to British racism between the two world wars.