Taipei is, for many, something of an undiscovered gem of a city—temperate climate, plenty of green, great public transport. Of course there’s that annoying massive country across the Straits that keeps blustering and saber rattling, but mostly Taipei just gets on with it. It’s not the most prolific crime writing city in the world, but it does have its moments.
Among the best known of these are the creations of Ed Lin, a New Yorker of Taiwanese and Chinese descent, who first came to the attention of crime readers with his NYC Chinatown trilogy featuring the very noir and gritty Robert Chow. His Taipei Night Market novels are keeping him front-and-center. Ghost Month (2014) is set in August—Taiwan’s ghost month. Jing-nan runs a food stand in a bustling Taipei night market (mostly sprawling food courts full of great snacks that attract enormous crowds) until he finds out an ex-girlfriend has been murdered. Jing-nan returns in Incensed (2016), this time with his gangster uncle, Big Eye, who needs a favor. The third, and most recent, Taipei Market novel is 99 Ways to Die (2018), once again with Jing-nan and his frenemy Peggy Lee, a successful corporate businesswoman whose father has been kidnapped. All the Taiwan Night Market novels are great stories but also full of the flavors, smells and tastes of Taipei. If you can read the trio of Night Market books and not fancy a Chinese snack afterwards then there’s something wrong with you!
Just as redolent of all things Taipei and Taiwanese is Francie Lin’s The Foreigner (2008), which won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author. Emerson Chang is a Chinese-American of Taiwanese immigrant parents (as is Lin). He’s a 40-year-old virgin, can’t speak Chinese, and a momma’s boy who’s not seen a lot of the world. When mum dies he has to go to Taipei and finds his family enmeshed in the Taiwanese underworld. The Foreigner is a noir, though that unusual thing, a somewhat comic noir. But it is gripping.
A few more Taipei reads:
- Taroko Gorge (2009) by Jacob Rittari deals with three Japanese schoolgirls found dead in Taroko Gorge in a national park south of Taipei. An American reporter and his photographer partner become involved, having been the last people to see the girls alive. Together with girls’ classmates, their head teacher and a Taiwanese detective they set about finding the killer.
- William Arnold’s China Gate (1983) was apparently banned in Taiwan for many years for revealing too much about Taipei’s underbelly. The story of five-year-old Bryan Whyte who is forced with his family to leave mainland China in 1949 when the communists come to power. Later, he finds himself a teenager on the mean streets of Taipei with nothing but some old gangland connections from China. He survives the vicissitudes of the Vietnam War and Taiwan’s economic boom of the 1970s to become a powerful crime boss. Certainly in the tradition of James Clavell and Jeffrey Archer, but not quite in their league.
- Marjorie Liu is best known for her work as a comic book writer with Marvel, especially her Wolverine stories and her graphic novel series Monstress. She also writes the Dirk and Steele series, about a paranormal detective agency. Crimes get solved but with witnesses, victims and murderers being shape-shifters, mermen, psychics, gargoyles and witches. There are eleven books in the series and a few of them head to China. The Red Heart of Jade (2006) is set in Taiwan where people are suddenly bursting into flames.
- Local writer Chang Ta-chun (known as Zhang Dachun on mainland China) splits his time between Taipei and Iowa and is one of Taiwan’s best-known contemporary writers. His novel Wild Child (2002) followed his first novel Wild Kids (2000)—both are published in one volume by Columbia University Press. Wild Child follows 14-year-old Hou Shichun as he drops out of school and becomes involved in the Taiwanese underworld. There he finds a cast of incredible characters and a range of oddball dropouts just like himself.
As with many other Crime and the City columns translation is a big problem. Taiwan does have a tradition of crime fiction going back to the early 1900s, 1920s and 1930s when the island was occupied by Japan. Some writing appeared in Japanese and local periodicals, including one called Mystery Magazine, from writers like Li Yitao and Ye Bu-yue, but none of this has been translated. Everyone from Sherlock Holmes and Arsène Lupin to the current biggest European and American crime writers are on sale. But there is still a dearth of translated work from Taiwanese writers—both historical and contemporary.
There certainly is much work that should be translated. Chi Wei-Jan is a Taiwanese essayist, playwright and university professor in English literature. Private Eyes, his first novel, was a publishing sensation when it came out in Chinese in 2011, winning almost every major literary award in Taiwan that year. It’s a noir that highlights the isolation and loneliness of the modern city in Taipei’s “Dead Zone,” an area Chi believes specializes only in funerals, and where his hero opens his private detective agency. The book asks why Taiwan—hardly a crime free zone—still doesn’t have a major serial killer and is tech-savvy with innovative use of CCTV in the plot lines. Private Eyes has been hailed by just about everyone who’s been able to read it as brilliant (there’s a snippet in English here) yet, to the best of my knowledge, has still found no takers in English.
And so, as ever, one last special recommendation—Li Ang’s The Butcher’s Wife (1986), inspired by a true story in 1930s Shanghai transplanted to Taiwan. The story of Lin Shi, a pig-butcher’s wife, forced into an arranged marriage, in a coastal town near Taipei, who is beaten mercilessly and repeatedly by her husband. Her neighbors condemn her for screaming and tell her to be more tolerant of her husband. Lin Shi, eventually driven to madness by the repeated beatings, kills her husband with his own professional instrument, his meat cleaver. Li Ang was born in Taiwan but now lives in America, though on publication The Butcher’s Wife was seemingly equally praised and reviled. Those that admired the book see Li Ang as a storyteller on a par with Zola or Lu Xun exposing domestic abuse and violence within marriage. Those that disliked her book made the claim that she unfairly denigrates Taiwanese traditions of religious belief and wifely piety.
Today, The Butcher’s Wife is generally considered a classic of Taiwanese literature that challenged the oppression of women excused by ritual and tradition. As with books by Zola, Lu Xun, Dostoevsky in their own countries and cultures, Li Ang essentially used a tale of crime to challenge Taiwan’s society.
