The ancient capital of Tibet, its name literally translates as “place of gods,” a religious centre as devout as the Vatican, Mecca, or Jerusalem. One of the highest cities in the world, invaded by Britain now occupied by China but still the centre of Tibetan Buddhism. Contested territory, the Dalai Lama forced to live in exile and not the imposing Potala Palace that looms over the city of monasteries, temples and palaces against a backdrop of the Himalayas.
We all know that no lesser figure in crime writing than Sherlock Holmes spent time in Tibet after falling from the Reichenbach Falls. The Tibetan political activist and writer Jamyang Norbu wrote The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes (1999), a novel alternatively known as Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years and recounts Holmes’s adventures in Tibet in his “missing year” from 1891 before Conan Doyle decided to bring his creation back from Tibet to Baker Street. In a neat bit of double-meta, Holmes (in the absence obviously of Dr Watson) partners with Huree Chunder Mookerjee, another fictional spy who last worked for the English in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1900). Other indicators of Holmes’s time in Tibet and the East are to be found in Ted Riccardi’s The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes: Nine Adventures from the Lost Years (2011) imagining the great detectives lost adventures during his “great hiatus” in places as far flung as Sumatra and Tibet. Tibet has been a source of great fun for many crime writers and Sherlockians for decades – Richard Wincour (a prolific author who wrote books about everything from contract law to chess moves to Golden Age style mysteries) published Sherlock Holmes in Tibet in 1968. But there’s more to Tibet than just Holmes…
The prolific British spy thriller writer Lionel Davidson first published The Rose of Tibet in 1962, it was his second novel and sold well. The story is set at the time of the Chinese invasion in 1950. A London school teacher Charles Houston makes an illegal journey from India to Tibet to find his lost brother. What he doesn’t know is that his coming was prophesied a century earlier. Now both the Tibetans and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army are looking for him as he shelters at the Yamdring monastery. The book has had an amazing afterlife and is a much-loved novel of the cognoscenti of crime writing. Graham Greene said of the novel: “I hadn’t realised how much I had missed the genuine adventure story until I read The Rose of Tibet” and it was successfully reissued in a new edition in 2016 with an introduction by Anthony Horowitz. Sixty years later it’s still selling well and finding new fans.
Elliot Pattison’s Inspector Shan novels also found legions of fans and evolved into a five book series. Beginning with The Skull Mantra (1999) where we meet Shan Tao Yun, a former Beijing investigator for the Chinese government who has found himself ethically conflicted in Tibet and too sympathetic to the persecuted Buddhist monks. Not a good thing to be in Tibet as a Chinese official and so Shan is now in a Tibetan prison camp high in the Himalayas. But when a smartly dressed headless corpse is discovered, Shan is forced to become a detective once more. American mining engineers, Tibetan sorcerers, corrupt Chinese officials and a Buddhist Resistance movement all come to the fore. The Skull Mantra won an Edgar award in 2000.
Eight Inspector Shan novels followed. In Water Touching Stone (2001) Shan heads to the remote northern reaches of the Tibetan plateau. Then, in Bone Mountain (2002), Shan, now more trusted by the Tibetans despite his previous affiliations, joins a group of reverent Tibetans returning a sacred artefact to Tibet. In Beautiful Ghosts (2004) a murder in Tibet sees Shan finally leave the province and travel to Beijing and then America. But after the case Shan is sent right back to Tibet and given the job of Inspector of Irrigation and Sewer Ditches in a remote Tibetan township. In the final Inspector Shan novel, Bones of the Earth (2019) Shan is on the case of corruption among Party officials in Tibet. Altogether the Inspector Shan series offers a fascinating insight into the opaque world of Chinese-occupied Tibet, relations between Tibetans and Chinese, the clash of ancient religion and enforced Chinese notions of modernity and the spiritualism of the country.
A few other Tibet-set crime novels…
- Buddhism and mindfulness expert David Michie (better known to some readers perhaps as the author of The Dalai Lama’s Cat series of novels combining Buddhist learnings with, errr, your inner cat) also wrote The Magician of Lhasa (2017), the first “Matt Lester Spiritual Thriller” A novice monk Tenzin Dorje accepts a mission to carry two ancient, secret texts across the Himalayas to safety as the Chinese invade Tibet. Scientist Matt Lester is called in to analyse the texts. The second Matt Lester book is called The Secret Mantra (2020) where he encounters an ancient, sealed scroll containing prophetic wisdom brought to him by Tibetan Lamas.
- CJ Carver’s The Snow Thief (2020) follows formally disgraced Lhasa detective Shan Lia on the trail of Tibet’s first ever serial killer, the Snow Thief. Her superior officer, Dao Tan, is horrified. He doesn’t want panic and hysteria rolling across the country and Shan Lia’s digging things up won’t get him any thanks from Beijing.
- Iris Johansen’s Live to See Tomorrow (2014) is in the series featuring the secretive Catherine Ling, abandoned on the streets of Hong Kong at age four, trained by a skilled assassin and master poisoner and then recruited by the CIA. Now Catherine has been tasked with recovering an American journalist with mysterious ties to Hu Chang, has been kidnapped in Tibet.
And finally, something different as ever, Douglas Veenhof’s White Lama (2011), the true story of Theos Bernard. Born in 1908, Bernard was a grad student at Columbia University in 1936 when he decided he needed to go to India to do research on Tantric Yoga. He subsequently became only the third American to even be officially allowed to enter Tibet, where he finally was able to study with the highest Tantric masters. Bernard became fluent in the Tibetan language, travelled in Tibet, met senior figures, and gathered an extensive collection of photographs, field notes, manuscripts, and ritual objects. And then, in 1947, in northern India he disappeared. Veerhof, a former mountain guide and an award-winning journalist is a Buddhist and yoga practitioner, and he recreates Bernard’s life and the vents that led to Bernard, and his Tibetan companion, being shot and their bodies thrown in a river.
And so Tibet remains, in so many ways an enigma but also a fault line of resistance and the fight to maintain an identity against seemingly overwhelming odds.
