Sherlock In Shanghai

Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s—"the Paris of the Orient"—was both a glittering metropolis and a shadowy world of crime and social injustice. It was also home to Huo Sang and Bao Lang, fictional Chinese counterparts to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. The duo lived in a spacious apartment on Aiwen Road, where Huo Sang played the violin (badly) and smoked Golden Dragon cigarettes as he mulled over his cases. Cheng Xiaoqing (1893–1976), "The Grand Master" of twentieth-century Chinese detective fiction, had first encountered Conan Doyle’s highly popular stories as an adolescent. In the ensuing years he played a major role in rendering them first into classical and later into vernacular Chinese. In the late 1910s, Cheng began writing detective fiction very much in Conan Doyle’s style, with Bao as the Watson-like-I narrator—a still rare instance of so direct an appropriation from foreign fiction. Cheng Xiaoqing wrote detective stories to introduce the advantages of critical thinking to his readers, to encourage them to be skeptical and think deeply, because truth often lies beneath surface appearances. His attraction to the detective fiction genre can be traced to its reconciliation of the traditional and the modern. In "The Shoe," Huo Sang solves the case with careful reasoning, while "The Other Photograph" and "On the Huangpu" blend this reasoning with a sensationalism reminiscent of traditional Chinese fiction. "The Odd Tenant" and "The Examination Paper" also demonstrate the folly of first impressions. "At the Ball" and "Cat’s-Eye" feature the South-China Swallow, a master thief who, like other outlaws in traditional tales, steals only from the rich and powerful. "One Summer Night" clearly shows Cheng’s strategy of captivating his Chinese readers with recognizably native elements even as he espouses more globalized views of truth and justice.

A movie star, a politician’s nephew, and a photograph with compromising implications, Gao Ming (Sherlock Holmes) faces a high stakes case involving the international community of 1920’s Shanghai. With the trusty Dr. Watson at his side, Sherlock finds himself pitted against the beautiful Hu Die, a star of Chinese cinema. Will Sherlock retrieve the picture in time or will Hu Die outwit the master of deduction? Level 2 is intended for Chinese learners at a low intermediate level. Most learners who have been able to comfortably read Mandarin Companion Level 1 should be able to read this book. This series is designed to combine simplicity of characters with an easy-to-understand storyline that helps learners grow their vocabulary and language comprehension abilities. The more they read,

A movie star, a politician’s nephew, and a photograph with compromising implications, Gao Ming (Sherlock Holmes) faces a high stakes case involving the international community of 1920’s Shanghai. With the trusty Dr. Watson at his side, Sherlock finds himself pitted against the beautiful Hu Die, a star of Chinese cinema. Will Sherlock retrieve the picture in time or will Hu Die outwit the master of deduction? Level 2 is intended for Chinese learners at a low intermediate level. Most learners who have been able to comfortably read Mandarin Companion Level 1 should be able to read this book. This series is designed to combine simplicity of characters with an easy-to-understand storyline that helps learners grow their vocabulary and language comprehension abilities. The more they read,

Snake Bite is the fifth in the Young Sherlock Holmes series in which the iconic detective is reimagined as a brilliant, troubled and engaging teenager – creating unputdownable detective adventures that remain true to the spirit of the original books. Kidnapped and taken to China, Sherlock finds himself plunged into adventure. How can three men be bitten by the same poisonous snake in different parts of Shanghai? Who wants them dead, and why? The answer seems to lie in a message hidden in a diagram that looks like a spider’s web. But solving it leads to an even more urgent question: what has all this got to do with a plot to blow up an American warship? Sherlock is about to brave terrors greater than any he has faced before . . . Sherlock Holmes. Think you know him? Think again. Continue the investigative adventures with Andrew Lane's Knife Edge and Stone Cold.

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 1998 in the subject Orientalism / Sinology - Chinese / China, grade: 1, University of Hamburg, language: English, abstract: Cheng Xiaoqing, the author of the Huo Sang cases, was one of the most prolific and successful Chinese detective fiction authors of the so-called Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School." In China, Western detective fiction was introduced at the turn of the 19th century. Cheng Xiaoqing was among the first Chinese authors to not only translate, but also create original works in the genre. The author adopted the main framework of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes case - the very standard of the classical Western detective story - and created the "Eastern Sherlock Holmes," Huo Sang, and his secretary Bao Lang, the "Dr. Watson of the East." The figure of Huo Sang shows several superficial similarities derivative of the classical Western detective a la Sherlock Holmes. In addition, the character also incorporates fundamental elements of Chinese literature draw from traditional figures such as the famous Judge Bao in classical court-case fiction and from the traditional chivalric heroes within the knight-errant tradition. Thus, Cheng did not merely create another British detective implanted into Shanghai. Instead, he fabricated a Chinese detective who is a synthesis of Western and Eastern influences and who reflects the contradictions and tensions of the environment he operates in. The story of China's meeting with modern detective fiction can, thus, be seen as a microcosm of China's encounter with the West. Cheng's import of the detective novel into a different cultural and political context required the employment of figures, settings and situations that offered relevant and compelling meanings for the contemporary reader. By merging different genres and thereby creating detective stories that were not just imitating the Western model, but also interweaving it with traditional elements of Chinese literary tradition. Cheng's inn

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “[Laurie R.] King enriches the Sherlockian legacy.”—The Boston Globe For Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, returning to the Sussex coast after seven months abroad was especially sweet. There was even a mystery to solve—the unexplained disappearance of an entire colony of bees from one of Holmes’s beloved hives. But the anticipated sweetness of their homecoming is quickly tempered by a galling memory from the past. Mary had met Damian Adler only once before, when the surrealist painter had been charged with—and exonerated from—murder. Now the troubled young man is enlisting the Holmeses’ help again, this time in a desperate search for his missing wife and child. Mary has often observed that there are many kinds of madness, and before this case yields its shattering solution she’ll come into dangerous contact with a fair number of them. From suicides at Stonehenge to the dark secrets of a young woman’s past on the streets of Shanghai, Mary will find herself on the trail of a killer more dangerous than any she’s ever faced—a killer Sherlock Holmes himself may be protecting for reasons near and dear to his heart. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Laurie R. King's The God of the Hive and Pirate King.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day comes this stunning work of soaring imagination. Born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, Banks was orphaned at the age of nine after the separate disappearances of his parents. Now, more than twenty years later, he is a celebrated figure in London society; yet the investigative expertise that has garnered him fame has done little to illuminate the circumstances of his parents' alleged kidnappings. Banks travels to the seething, labyrinthine city of his memory in hopes of solving the mystery of his own, painful past, only to find that war is ravaging Shanghai beyond recognition-and that his own recollections are proving as difficult to trust as the people around him. Masterful, suspenseful and psychologically acute, When We Were Orphans offers a profound meditation on the shifting quality of memory, and the possibility of avenging one’s past.

"In Detecting Chinese Modernities: Rupture and Continuity in Modern Chinese Detective Fiction (1896-1949), Yan Wei historicizes the two stages in the development of Chinese detective fiction and discusses the rupture and continuity in the cultural transactions, mediation, and appropriation that occurred when the genre of detective fiction traveled to China during the first half of the twentieth century. Wei identifies two divergent, or even opposite strategies for appropriating Western detective fiction during the late Qing and the Republican periods. She further argues that these two periods in the domestication of detective fiction were also connected by shared emotions. Both periods expressed ambivalent and sometimes contradictory views regarding Chinese tradition and Western modernity"--