Shoot! This was a disappointment. I only bought it because I recognized the author as the woman who wrote A Dark-Adapted Eye under the name of Barbara Vine. Speaker of Mandarin is billed as "A New Inspector Wexford Mystery," but I am not a knowledgeable mystery/detective fiction fan and I finished the book without retaining a shred of information about the Inspector except what he does, which is inspect, detect. I didn't remember a name, whether or not he was retired, how old he was, and certainly didn't remember any idiosyncracy that personalized him. He goes to China to, I believe, teach the Chinese how to run their police. He has a rather miserable time. He doesn't like the constant hustle and chatter of his official guide. And fairly soon, after having been shocked by graphic explanations of footbinding (he didn't know??) begins to hallucinate an old woman in black, hobbling on bound feet behind him, waiting wherever he goes, staring at him in anxiety and hope. I must say this seems a novelty in crime detection: the detective hallucinating.Like The Orient Express, the story introduces a number of mildly eccentric characters, none of whom are very engaging: there's a blathering middle-aged wife and her long-suffering poetic husband, an unmarried woman companion of the wife, two unmarried men—each unpleasant in his own way and a feud between them doubles the unpleasantries. A stunningly beautiful young woman appears near the journey's end. And back in England, some time later, the chatty wife is murdered when she's home alone. Her son and especially her daughter are in their turn unpleasant people. (Do you wonder why I forget this book?)The inspector is sure the clue lies back in the China tour, and he uncovers crimes enough related to it: A young Chinese man's accidental drowning was perhaps not accidental. The hobbling old woman looking for illicit news of her absentee son. And precious antiques smuggled out of the country on top of the unscrupulous underpayment to Chinese sellers for "little objects" which the buyers know to be royal jade or otherwise extremely valuable. (You see the same thoughtless haggling in Mexico where a couple of dollars more or less mean nothing whatsoever to the U.S. tourist and everything to a vendor.)The crime is solved at last and all one learns is that there are more unpleasant people in this world than just the ones on the tour. "Speaking Mandarin," the title, does have a special and quite clever meaning, but it's an unmotivated coincidence. I need more than a convoluted plot and a clever clue to enjoy a book. I need characters I can care about. And, oh, yes, the hallucinations are finally ratiocinated. My suggestion? Read A Dark-Adapted Eye instead. It's not a detective story, but it does have unsolved mysteries in the family of the narrator, a woman whose aunt—a twin to her father—was hanged some thirty years before for killing her other, younger, sister. Someone is proposing to write a book about the executed aunt, and calls on Faith, the narrator now a young woman, to help shed light on the family and on the murder itself. And she begins to face the family history. It's just a marvelously evocative book of the life of conventional snobbery and narrow pretense in England in the thirties and forties; I could hardly put it down, as if I were fascinated watching snakes circle each other.The Inspector Wexford mystery didn't hold my interest at all except a vague guessing of what in the world the answer would be. And it did surprise, but seemed a little bit deus ex machina. How Much I Did Not Like This Book.Underlying all my displeasure with the book is, I suppose, a politically based critique--not a dogmatic one, but one engrained in my fascination with the lies, distortion, fictions of history and ideology. "An inspector/detective type," I wrote in notes, "travels with a supervisor to China to 'confer'—i.e., to teach the modern Chinese nation how to run their police investigations, which calls to mind certain other generous Empire-things like School of the Americas where Latin American death squads and torture experts are trained in Georgia, or all those happy businessmen teaching "free trade" to those benighted primitive ex-commies under the guise of "democratizing Eastern Europe. Was this really what Gorbachev had in mind?" Yes, I was in a sour mood.Said inspector spends a free week on a guided tour. He doesn't like his over-officious talkative guide's enthusiasm for Mao, for factories, for anything celebrating the modernization of China—things that, in China, were/are marvelous. No, he wants the colonists' China: one where privileged Brit/Euro travelers can "tour" at will, with silent acquiescent servants, a swank hotel of the travelers' choice, and menu ditto. Picturesque old China: when it had "civilization." Resorts in Mexico are full of people with the same longing but one they can still indulge there: they don't care about poverty, homelessness, malnutrition, despair among Mexican people. They want clean cool accommodations in the tropics with well-disciplined uniformed servants who speak English. And entertainment in "folklorico" costumes. They want a playground and a peep show, to see all that "picturesque" Old Mexico (at a safe distance) that matches their colonialist vision. China—knowing that tourists mostly disapprove of policies that have ended the starvation of earlier decades—keeps their travels circumscribed less to prevent them from asking questions than to prevent them from playing the vigilante come to "free the people." I am pretty tired of this kind of tourist report. It takes much longer than a one-week tour "of China" to speak of the nation meaningfully. Of course, travel literature thrives on such impressionism and its shallow generalizations. See Levi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques but I am still digressing. Sorry. Grumpy. I'm being generous with two stars. Grump.
After finishing this book, I realized -- sadly -- that I have now read all of Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford series. I found this to be one of the weaker entries in a generally splendid set of books. What I liked best about the series is that Rendell let the characters grow and age and evolve. The leading figures are nuanced, not stick figures. I have read that Rendell does not plan to add any more volumes to the series. I can see how an author could grow tired of her creations. More to the point, I can understand how the writer is challenged to keep inventing new situations for her characters. In this case, the story opens in China and as the tale goes on it becomes clear that something pivotal happened in China. However, I found the interlude in China to be uninteresting and the whole Wexford-as-tourist ploy to be a needless diversion. It would be like taking Thomas Hardy's creations out of Wessex.That being said, I am glad I have got to know Reg Wexford and his No. 2 man, Mike Burden. They kept me company on a many a cold night, and for the most part they were terrific companions. Ideally, a reader would benefit from reading this series in chronological order, although I realize that funds are limited for many of us and most libraries don't stock the full set.
What do You think about Speaker Of Mandarin (1984)?
I hadn't read a Rendell before but wasn't surprised by how much I enjoyed it because my mother is a huge fan and our reading tastes tend to overlap.Rendell came a little later than the three queens of the English mystery but her work is very like Sayers, Marsh, and Christie showing off a lovely little snippet of English life through the telling of a mystery.When the book opens, Inspector Wexford is in China, sort of enjoying a holiday but there at the request of a friend? I missed the explanation of that, it was sort of short, but the thrust of the story is that he ends up on the same route as a group of travelers. As he travels with them, he gets to see some of the personalities. It is a surprise when one of the older women from the trip is one of Wexford's victims. Wait, that's an awkward sentence. She's murdered and Wexford is put on the case.
—Jessi
Read by.................. Michael BryantTotal Runtime......... 5 Hours 52 MinsDescription: Chief Inspector Wexford is in China visiting ancient tombs and palaces with a group of British tourists. After their return to England, one of his fellow tourists is found murdered - a burglary it seems, but Wexford has other ideas. As he questions other members of the group, Wexford finds secrets of greed, treachery, theft, and adultery, leading the distressed inspector to ask not who is innocent, but who is least guilty . . .I am hoping this is not the jumping the shark book, that it was a dire one-off, a tragic mistake. Only way to find out is to dive in to the next one.3* From Doon With Death (Inspector Wexford, #1)3* A New Lease of Death (Inspector Wexford, #2)3* Wolf to the Slaughter (Inspector Wexford, #3)2* The Best Man to Die (Inspector Wexford, #4)3* A Guilty Thing Suprised #53* No More Dying Then (Inspector Wexford, #6)3* Murder Being Once Done (Inspector Wexford, #7)3* Some Lie and Some Die (Inspector Wexford, #8)3* Shake Hands Forever (Inspector Wexford, #9)3* A Sleeping Life (Inspector Wexford, #10)3* Put on by Cunning (Inspector Wexford #11)1* Speaker of Mandarin (Inspector Wexford, #12)3* Not in the Flesh (Inspector Wexford, #21)2* The Vault (Inspector Wexford, #23)
—Bettie☯
I liked some of the twists in this mystery. After reading some of the other reviews, I'll concede that Rendell doesn't tell us much about Wexford (the detective) - I felt comfortable with him because I've read so many of the Wexford mysteries and perhaps didn't notice how scant her descriptions were.It's was definitely the mystery itself (and its various subplots) that engaged me. I found the racism rather unpalatable, though. It's hard to believe that this was written only thirty years ago. The use of the words "inscrutable" and "slant-eyed," as well as writing 'l' for 'r' to make explicit someone's difficulty with English sounds, just in the first three pages, was a bit of a shock - it seemed more like a novel from the 1930s than from the '80s.
—Margie
