The Feng Shui Detective
The Feng Shui Detective is a series of "comedy-crime" novels by Asian author Nury Vittachi.
Originally started on Hongkong.com, as a community-contributed short story, the published books started to appear in Hong Kong in 2000, but since have been printed around the world in multiple languages.
Overview
The Feng Shui Detective follows CF Wong, a feng shui master living in Singapore, who is forced to take on a young Australian assistant named Joyce McQuinnie. Expecting to be moving furniture, she discovers that Wong specializes in the feng shui of crime scenes. Understanding between the two is fraught - Wong speaks pidgin English, augmented by idioms learned from a textbook, and tends to be sexist, racist, money-oriented, and likes to eat small animals (alive if possible); Joyce, on the other hand, speaks in impenetrable youth argot and is a politically correct vegetarian.
There are five books in the series, with the most recent novel, "Mr. Wong Goes West", being published in February 2008. They have also been numerous "mini-mysteries" - short tales about the same characters - which have appeared in magazines in China. The stories are widely seen as allegories of East and West ideologies and practices. Although the main characters are suspicious of each other and find it almost impossible to communicate, resolution is only possible when they work together.
Published novels
- The Feng Shui Detective (ISBN 9781387802128, July 2000, Chameleon Press)
- The Feng Shui Detective Goes South (ISBN 9789628631933, March 2002, Chameleon Press)
- The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook (ISBN 9789889706036, 2003, Chameleon Press)
- The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (ISBN 9781741147797, June 2006, Allen & Unwin)
- Mr. Wong Goes West (ISBN 9781741753851, February 2008, Allen & Unwin)