Nine Murders and a Grievance

Nine Murders and a Grievance opens with a night attack, a burning house and nine people dead, and only then goes back to explain how a feud over feng shui and a family grave led there. Based on a real Guangdong case of the 1720s, Wu Jianren's novel follows the bribed officials and endless appeals that keep the truth buried. Its flashback opening was borrowed from Western detective fiction, and it reads like a modern crime thriller. This is a complete new English translation, with names in modern pinyin and the text rendered as plain, readable English prose. Every case is short and self-contained, and together they form one of the roots of the Chinese detective story, long before Judge Dee reached the West.