The Railway Conspiracy (A Dee and Lao Mystery, Band 2) - Hardcover

Rozan, SJ; Nee, John Shen Yen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1641296607 ISBN 13: 9781641296601

Verlag: Soho Crime, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Judge Dee and Lao She must use all their powers of deduction—and kung fu skills—to take down a sinister conspiracy between Imperial Russia, Japan, and China in a rollicking new mystery set in 1920s London.

The follow-up to The Murder of Mr. Ma, this historical adventure-mystery is perfect for fans of Laurie R. King and the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films.

London, 1924. Following several months abroad, Judge Dee Ren Jie has returned to the city to foil a transaction between a Russian diplomat and a Japanese mercenary. Aided by Lao She—the Watson to his Holmes—along with several other colorful characters, Dee stops the illicit sale of an extremely valuable “dragon-taming” mace.

The mace’s owner is a Chinese businesswoman who thanks Dee for its retrieval by throwing a lavish dinner party. In attendance is British banking official A. G. Stephen, who argues with the group about the tenuous state of Chinese nationalism—and is poisoned two days later. Dee knows this cannot be a coincidence, and suspects Stephen won’t be the only victim. Sure enough, a young Chinese communist of Lao’s acquaintance is killed not long after—and a note with a strange symbol is found by his body.

What could connect these murders? Could it be related to rumors of a conspiracy regarding the Chinese Eastern Railway? It is once again all on the unlikely crime-solving duo of Dee and Lao to solve the case before anyone else ends up tied to the rails.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Shen Yen Nee
is a half Chinese, half Scottish American media executive, producer and entrepreneur who was born in Knoxville, grew up in San Diego, and is now based in Los Angeles, with a penchant for very long run-on sentences. He has served as president of WildStorm Productions, senior vice president of DC Comics, publisher of Marvel Comics, CEO of Cryptozoic Entertainment; and cofounder of CCG Labs.

SJ Rozan
is the author of twenty novels and over eighty short stories, and editor of three anthologies. She has won multiple awards, including the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, Macavity; Japanese Maltese Falcon; and the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award. She’s served on the national boards of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, and as president of Private Eye Writers of America. SJ has taught at such diverse places as the Art Workshop International in Assisi, Italy; Singapore Management University in Singapore; the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida; and the Novel-in-Progress Bookcamp in Wisconsin. She was born in the Bronx and lives in Manhattan.

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Prologue
Beijing, 1966


It seems every tale of Dee Ren Jie begins with a fight.
     Dee himself is the most patient and just of men; yet in some places and in some times, patience and justice are not the virtues most prized by some men. In those times and places, preparing oneself for the rigors of physical combat is the way of wisdom, and Dee is also wise.
     In years to come, men looking back on China in our day, as I am looking back now on England in an earlier one, may conclude that was how things were with us. I cannot say.
     But with certainty, I can say this: it was how things were in London in the late summer of 1924.
 
 
CHAPTER ONE
London, 1924

I’m just telling yer, Mr. Dee, and with respect, o’ course, I don’t much like this place yer’ve brought us to. A mist so thick I can almost grab ’old of it, and trees way over me ’ead, with ’oo knows what’s walking around in ’em. Monkeys and such, I’ll warrant! And the smell in the air—it ain’t natural, sir. With nary a streetlamp to be seen. Just shadows and the shadows o’ shadows. And deer! Deer, Mr. Dee! With great sharp ’orns. Could we not do our business elsewhere, is all I’m asking.”
     “We could do our business anywhere, Jimmy.” Judge Dee, unseen, answered the complaint of young Jimmy Fingers from deep in the darkness under a massive oak. “The men we’ve come to intercept, however, insist on doing theirs here. Don’t worry. If all goes well, I’ll have you back on the streets of London within the hour.”
     This promise was a touch superfluous, as we had not left London. To reach the streets, one would have had merely to stroll ten minutes from the Richmond Park clearing, in which we stood. Our errand had not brought us very far into that greensward, certainly not far enough to encounter the King’s deer, with or without great sharp horns. The damp and loamy scent Jimmy protested was, in fact, that of man’s original Arcadian state, in contrast to the scents Jimmy preferred and that awaited us beyond the park’s walls: the smoke of coal fires and the exhaust of buses and motorcars, the aromas of cooked meat and horse dung and whatever was floating at the moment in the Thames. As for monkeys, the nearest were twenty-five kilometers away, asleep in their cages at the Regent’s Park Zoo.
     “Jimmy,” I said, speaking in English as Dee had, for admire Dee as he did, the lad had yet to learn a word of Chinese, “does an evening in the greenery not suit you?”
     “That it don’t, Mr. Lao. The dark is too . . . dark! And things is rustling—” He jumped as a thing rustled. “I ’aven’t spent a great deal o’ time in such places, see. Parks and trees and all don’t ’ave much to offer a man engaged in my line o’ work.”
     Although Jimmy had for a time been, and was now again, in the employ of Dee, Dee had lately been absent from London for some months. In April, he’d sailed for China, and none of us—myself, Jimmy, or Sergeant Hoong, who completed our foursome here in the clearing—had been sure he would return, and if he were to do so, when. Hoong had reverted to his shopkeeping, with which he claimed to be content. I could not say as much for my sentiments toward my own life lecturing in the basics of the Chinese language at the University of London. Classes, when I took them up again, I found no more stimulating than when I first began them upon my arrival in London the year previous. For his part, Jimmy Fingers asserted, whenever we three met for a bowl of noodles—to his credit, the young man had developed quite an appreciation for the cuisine of my homeland during his first stint in Dee’s service—that he was tiptoeing the straight and narrow, that I am, sirs. However, according to Hoong’s intelligence, Jimmy had happily resumed his career as a pickpocket. Pickpocketing, of course, requires pockets to pick, which are hard to come by amid tall trees and things that rustle.
     “Lao,” said Sergeant Hoong now, interrupting my reverie, “you are lollygagging. Do you intend to take advantage of our time here to learn this skill, or have you so quickly lost interest in improving your fighting technique?”
     Jimmy laughed. “Lollygagging! Mr. ’Oong, sir, that’s a fine bit o’ English yer’ve picked up there!”
     I was less amused. “I am not ‘lollygagging,’ nor anything like it. I’ve practiced your one-inch punch until my knuckles bleed, and all I have to show for it is a sore shoulder.”
     “And bleedin’ knuckles, o’ course,” Jimmy put in helpfully.
     “In fact,” I said, “I’m beginning to question the value of this vaunted skill. How much force can actually be exerted by a blow of such a short distance?”
     Jimmy tilted his head thoughtfully. “A fair question, that.”
     Hoong, with a disdainful glance at us both, walked through the mist to a small statue of Cupid that stood at the center of the clearing. It was a silly, frilly thing, all curly locks and flower garlands. Pulling his fist back an inch from the sculpture’s round belly, Hoong marshalled the energy of his body from the bottoms of his feet up through his torso, focusing it all into his forearm—or so he instructed me every time I attempted this technique. With a low cry (we were, after all, waiting in this place to create an ambush) of “Chuen ging, inch power!” Hoong thrust his fist an inch forward and made contact with the stone.
     Cupid toppled to the ground.
     “Oh,” I said, rather weakly.
     “Oh!” marveled Jimmy Fingers, with more strength.
     “Oh,” snapped Dee. “Hoong, really.” He stepped forward from the oak’s inky shadow.
     Any man unprepared would have been terrified into paralysis by seeing Dee, in this form, appear between ancient trees at midnight. The black of his tapered trousers and tunic was echoed in his leather gloves and tall boots and in the silk cape, scalloped like bat’s wings, that billowed behind him. Short, sharp horns protruded from his head, and his face, with features somewhere between a devil’s and a dream-fiend’s, wore a fierce and evil leer.
     However, we three had seen Judge Dee costumed as Springheel Jack, the Terror of London, on previous occasions, and thus—with the exception perhaps of a tiny step back taken by Jimmy—we were not alarmed.
     Dee, from behind the monstrous mask, gazed at the prone statue. “I hope you’ve only dislodged the thing and not damaged it,” he said. “What would your father say?” Sergeant Hoong’s father had been tutor to Dee and his younger brothers back home in Yantai. “I recognize,” Dee went on, “how exasperating it can be to deal with Lao. Still, you must control yourself better.”
     “Exasperating?” I said. “I must protest! I was in no way the cause of this insult to Eros.”
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Soho Crime
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1641296607
• ISBN 13: 9781641296601
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: EDITIONS GALLIMARD; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8.; Assago Milano; 20090; Italien