Set in China’s southwestern city of Chengdu, “Death Notice” follows Capt. Pei Tao as he and other detectives attempt to track down Eumenides, a shadowy vigilante who sends letters, or death notices, to people he believes have gotten away with crimes.
One of the book’s victims is a wealthy woman who runs over a roadside vendor in her BMW , killing him, but she escapes punishment because of her husband’s political connections. Eumenides—the name is a nod to the vengeful Furies of Greek mythology—tells his victims when they can expect to die and even encourages online voting to help determine his next target. He executes them with everything from knives to bombs.
A character like Eumenides can be a cathartic one for Chinese readers, said Mr. Zhou, a 41-year-old former schoolteacher who has written 14 books. He likened the villain to the folk-hero concept of youxia, or warrior vigilante, popular in classical Chinese poems and literature.
The first “Death Notice” book came out in 2009, and the trilogy has inspired a similarly named online series that has been viewed more than 2.4 billion times, according to Cheng Feng at Shanghai Dook Publishing, the Chinese publisher of “Death Notice.” A new generation of Chinese thriller writers began to develop five to 10 years ago, Mr. Cheng said, prompted by the popularity of overseas novelists like Dan Brown, Ken Follett and Keigo Higashino.
As readers have caught on to Mr. Zhou’s work, so have plagiarists, Mr. Cheng added. Mr. Zhou said he has been to court twice in the past five years because of such disputes, winning one plagiarism case and losing the other.
Bian Jiang, a 27-year-old bank manager from Huzhou, became a “Death Notice” fan after finding the books in his university library. “I like the way the books feature a very cerebral conflict between the police and a serial killer where, every step of the way, each side is trying to guess what the other is thinking and predict their actions,” he said.
“Death Notice” is the first Chinese thriller to be published by Doubleday, which is planning an 18,000-copy print run in the U.S. and to translate the next two books in the series, said editor Rob Bloom.
“I liked that it was something very much in the Western thriller tradition: a madman holding a city hostage, and an elite crew of detectives out to get him,” Mr. Bloom said.
Sweetening the deal: An English-language version of the first book was available, thanks to Shanghai-based translator Zac Haluza. “Often books in translation might come in with 30 or 40 pages translated and maybe a synopsis of the rest of it, because a lot of places don’t want to make a full translation before they have a deal,” Mr. Bloom said. “I was thrilled to have the whole thing in.”
“Death Notice” contrasts the glittering skyscraper existence of Chengdu’s upper class with the cockroach-infested slums of its poorest inhabitants. It remains to be seen how American readers will respond to how it diverges from the more familiar ways of stateside sleuths and crime thrillers in general.
For example, one argument among detectives concerns whether to use one of Eumenides’s targets to lure him out into the open. One officer warns that he could use a sniper rifle to do the killing from afar, but his concern is dismissed.
“Where do you think we are, Washington, D.C.? Not even our department has that kind of equipment,” says a colleague.
Elsewhere, Capt. Pei seems to be a lone wolf in the early chapters of the book but falls into line when his maverick behavior is criticized by his commanding officer. When an investigative task force is formed, they live together in the same dormitory, common practice for Chinese police on an important case, Mr. Zhou said.
“What really caught my eye is that you’re in a somewhat familiar setting where you have your police and an anonymous bad guy, but there is also this idea of respecting people’s sense of honor and the chain of command,” said Mr. Bloom, something, he added, “so foreign to what a Jack Reacher might do.”
Source: Wall Street Journal by Tobias Grey