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Chan Ho-Kei was born and raised in Hong Kong. He has worked as software engineer, script writer, game designer and editor of comic magazines. His writing career started with the short story “The Murder Case of Jack and the Beanstalk,” which was shortlisted for the Mystery Writers of Taiwan Award. He won the award the next year with “The Locked Room of Bluebeard.” Chan’s first novel, The Man Who Sold the World, won the Soji Shimada Mystery Award, the biggest mystery award in the Chinese-language world, and was published in five languages.
The Borrowed
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ISBN-13:
9780802189820
- Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
- Publication date: 01/03/2017
- Sold by: Barnes & Noble
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 496
- File size: 2 MB
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From award-winning Hong Kong writer Chan Ho-Kei, The Borrowed tells the story of Kwan Chun-dok, a Hong Kong detective whose career spans fifty years of the territory’s history. A deductive powerhouse, Kwan becomes a legend in the force, nicknamed “the Eye of Heaven” by his awe-struck colleagues. Divided into six sections told in reverse chronological order—each of which covers an important case in Kwan’s career and takes place at a pivotal moment in Hong Kong history from the 1960s to the present day—The Borrowed follows Kwan from his experiences during the Leftist Riot in 1967, when a bombing plot threatens many lives; the conflict between the HK Police and ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption) in 1977; the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989; to the Handover in 1997; and the present day of 2013, when Kwan is called on to solve his final case, the murder of a local billionaire, while Hong Kong increasingly resembles a police state. Along the way we meet Communist rioters, ultraviolent gangsters, stallholders at the city’s many covered markets, pop singers enmeshed in the high-stakes machinery of star-making, and a people always caught in the shifting balance of political power, whether in London or Beijing—all coalescing into a dynamic portrait of this fascinating city.
Tracing a broad historical arc, The Borrowed reveals just how closely everything is connected, how history always repeats itself, and how we have come full circle to repeat the political upheaval and societal unrest of the past. It is a gripping, brilliantly constructed novel from a talented new voice.
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Publishers Weekly
★ 11/21/2016Retired detective Kwon Chun-dok, the Sherlock Holmes–like hero of this ambitious episodic crime novel set in Hong Kong from Chan (The Man Who Sold the World), is on his deathbed in 2013, working on a murder case with the aid of his mentee, Insp. Sunny Lok. Subsequent sections, introduced in reverse chronological order, focus on the infamous triads of Hong Kong organized crime (in 2003), the transfer of sovereignty from the U.K. to China (in 1997), the Tiananmen Square riots (in 1989), and more. Trained in England, the brilliant Chun-dok has been a great success, “silently filling a glorious page of the history of Hong Kong policing.” The mysteries he solves, as clever as they may be, can feel a bit old-fashioned. The author’s real goal is to tell a history of modern Hong Kong, as Chan explains in his afterword. As a “social narrative” of the city, to use his phrase, the story is fascinating. Agent: Markus Hoffmann, Regal Hoffmann & Associates. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
Praise for The Borrowed : “This is an ambitious narrative brilliantly executed. It hands us the living history of Hong Kong through the gripping prism of crime and politics—told backwards. What an achievement!”—John Burdett, author of Bangkok 8
“Five decades of Hong Kong policing stand behind the wise Inspector Kwan as he helps his protégé, Detective Lok, confound murderers and reveal much about life in their unique homeland.”— Sunday Times (Crime Club) (UK)
“This naturally reminded me of Soji Shimada, and the strength of his detective Takeshi Yoshiki’s passion and determination to unravel clues. I also thought of . . . the American novelist Ed McBain, whose 87th Precinct series examines the intersections between police work and the individual lives of those in the force. The strong sense of social responsibility in the books by the Swedish Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö came to mind too.” — OKAPI
“With the police force and social conflicts as its background, covering 50 years of politics, history and economics, intertwined with clever detective fiction, [ The Borrowed ] fits peculiarly with the current social situation in Hong Kong, and will surely stir up readers’ emotions.”— Macau Closer
“This unusual collection of linked stories spans more than four decades, each of them set at a significant date in Hong Kong’s history . . . [starring] Inspector Kwan as an old-fashioned, omniscient . . . detective.”— Sunday Times (UK)
“[Chan’s] latest award-winning book is about the evolution of the police force and graft-busting in the city . . . [It] spans 50 years and is a tale about a prominent local policeman that takes in watershed events in Hong Kong . . . It is likely to strike a chord.”— South China Morning Post
“In the eternal search for something new in the crime genre, varieties from other countries other than the Nordic countries are undergoing forensic examination. . . The success of [ The Borrowed ] suggests that Hong Kong may be fertile territory . . . An innovative novel with a complex structure”—Barry Forshaw, CrimeTime (online)
“Chan Ho-kei’s The Borrowed is full of surprises . . . A brilliant detective novel.”—Taiwanese novelist and crime editor extraordinaire Wolf Hsu
Kirkus Reviews
2016-10-19Like Columbo but not funny.This is Soji Shimada Mystery Award winner Chan's first novel to be translated into English; it's a lengthy, ambitious tale about a legendary detective named Kwan Chun-dok, examining his career from the mid-1960s to the present day—and examining Kwan's beat, Hong Kong, during those fraught, turbulent years. Arranged in free-standing but interconnected novellas, proceeding in reverse chronological order, the book charts Kwan's evolution from savvy field investigator to head of the force's intelligence division against the backdrop of such historical events as the 1967 leftist riot, the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, and the epochal handover of 1997. Through these juxtapositions, Chan attempts to embroider both cultural history and psychological character study, but he fails to profitably exploit his setting or word count in this aim; the historical details provide sporadically engaging window dressing, but Chan's characters seldom address them directly, and Kwan himself remains something of a cipher, a genius at deduction with a generic, Tintin-like good-guy effect. Chan's strong suit is procedural plotting: the meat of the book is Kwan's crime-solving, and the author displays a formidable mastery of wrangling complex exposition in scenarios involving such calumny as an escaped nemesis bent on revenge, a kidnapping, and a series of terrorist bombings. Institutional corruption and the public's growing mistrust of the police emerge as the narrative's glum, overarching themes, lending the backward storytelling scheme a melancholy poignancy—but, despite Chan's aspirations to historical, cultural, and psychological insight, the real satisfaction here is found in the meat-and-potatoes cops-and-robbers material. Sprawling and dense, this novel will satisfy your procedural jones, but don't look for more than a cursory reckoning with the troubled history of Hong Kong.