Social Realism, Digital Detection, and the Crime Novel

The world of crime fiction is anything but parochial. Anglophone crime writing circulates globally, with a classic work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler just as likely to appear in a market stall in Bagdad or Mexico City as on the shelves of an American bookshop. Similarly, works of international crime fiction are translated with an unusual frequency and rapidity for the English-language market, where international stories of murder and detection are as popular as domestic alternatives. While the latest literary prize winner from, say, France, will often wait years for an English-language translation, if it gets one at all, crime novels by the likes of Fred Vargas will be available very quickly indeed. And there is even a growing body of academic work dedicated to expanding the traditional national focus of crime fiction studies to, as described in the introduction to Crime Fiction as World Literature, include the “complex, overlapping disjunctive networks and sub-networks” of the genre’s global contexts.

Yet this admirable internationalism is selective. Crime fiction from some national and regional traditions attracts considerable public and scholarly attention. The incredible success of Scandinavian Noir is the most obvious example of this, with the works of second and even third-tier writers circulating well beyond their home markets, and in the case of a writer like Stieg Larsson, achieving global fame. But other national literatures have, in comparison, been neglected. This is certainly true of Asian crime writing, which has attracted less attention than, for instance, Icelandic police procedurals, despite its long indigenous history (like the Gong’an novel originating in Yuan dynasty China, its enthusiastic early embrace and adaptation of Western forms of the genre (like Cheng Xiaoqing’s interwar Sherlockian mysteries featuring Huo Sang, and the energy of some of its national literatures (Japan, with its robust crime fiction output and numerous national genre-specific awards is a case in point). This relative neglect would be reason enough to direct our attention to an author like Chan Ho-Kei, a Hong Kong writer whose work is indebted to both regional and international crime writing traditions. But Chan’s work can also help us gain a better understanding of contemporary crime fiction more generally.

Chan came to crime fiction relatively late after working for a number of years as a software developer. He had always been a reader of mysteries, with a particular interest in Japanese writers — he has frequently cited Seishi Yokomizo’s Gokumon-t (Gokumon Island, 1947–1948) as his favorite novel — but it was not until one of his stories was shortlisted for a Taiwanese mystery prize that he began writing seriously. His 2014 novel, The Borrowed, brought him international recognition (with an English translation in 2017). Its six interlinked investigations, all centered on the impressively talented Hong Kong police detective Kwan Chun-dok, offer a social history of the city from 1967 to 2013 and a series of intricate puzzle-like mysteries. Second Sister, published in 2017 (English translation 2020) is more conventionally novelistic in structure, but it too uses the puzzle format to facilitate a wide-reaching exploration of Hong Kong’s social conditions. When the protagonist Nga-Yee Au enlists the help of a mysterious private detective known only as “N” to look into her younger sister Siu-Man’s suicide, an investigation ensues that relies heavily on logic and deduction to sort through a limited set of facts and suspects. But Chan also offers readers a bleak but effective picture of working-class life in Hong Kong, with its ruthless winner-take-all capitalist ethos, its minimal-to-non-existent social safety net, and its simmering political unrest.

The novel is thus situated on the border of the two categories that have long dominated discussion of Japanese (and Asian more generally) crime fiction: honkaku-ha and shakai-ha, or the “orthodox school” and the “social school.” The former, associated with figures like Edogawa Rampo and Soji Shimada, is characterized by...