Readers unfamiliar with Vittachi may think his name is Italian. It’s not. He’s a Sri Lankan by birth, and now lives in Hong Kong with his English wife and two adopted Chinese children. He’s written upwards of twenty books, fiction and non-fiction, writes a regular column for one of the large Asian newspapers, and blogs online. His New Year’s resolution for 2006 was to write and publish four books, one for adults, one for children, one non-fiction, and one of poetry, and to have them published with the biggest publishers he can find. (It was a kind of challenge to J K Rowling.) In view of the fact that very little publishing done in Hong Kong reaches the “outside” world, this was a major Resolution.

The first three books in Vittachi’s detective series don’t appear to have made it to the “outside” world, so I can only comment on those that follow, since they’ve been published in Australia.

The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics is number four in the series. Wong and his perennial young Australian sidekick, Joyce McQuinnie, who, much to his annoyance, has been foisted

upon him as his assistant, solve mysteries that crop up in the course of their Feng Shui business. I use the word “solve” in a loose sense. Wong and McQuinnie are certainly more innovative that McCall Smith s Precious Ramotswe, and in this book they get into far more hot water than that “traditionally-built” woman ever does, but don’t go looking for the P D James type of mystery here. Much of what happens to them is accidental (and occidental), and only native wit, the Asian worldview and happenstance get them out of some of their scrapes.

In this book, Vittachi is a writer who can’t keep a straight face for more than two minutes – even when he’s being serious. On one hand he writes of the very real concerns of vegans regarding people who want to eat animals that are killed before their eyes, of some very nasty “poetic justice” deaths, and of the destruction of the Uyghur culture by the Chinese. On the other he gives us the hilarious exchange between Wong and an official who’s about to demolish Wong’s office while he’s still in it, the shifting of a large, sleepy elephant through a traffic jam, and the cultural battle between an agenda-driven US secret service agent serving the POTUS (work it out!) and his female Chinese counterpart.

The central section of the book with its descriptions of animals dying unpleasant deaths isn’t for the squeamish. Nor is its sequel, in which some of the eaters are given their own just desserts. Apart from this, the book speeds wildly along as though it was made up a page at a time. In fact it’s better crafted in terms of plot than it appears.

The next book, The Feng Shui Detective’s Casebook, is a series of short stories, something that wasn’t apparent to me until I came to the end of what appeared to be the first chapter, and discovered there was nothing more about the episode of the tiger in the supermarket.

That slight disappointment out of the way, I enjoyed this second encounter with the middle-aged geomancer C F Wong. Wong is “not a heroic man,” he’s seemingly out of touch with modern technology, and he likes to eat Asian dishes in a fashion that some Westerners might find disturbing. His love/hate relationship with Joyce McQuinnie continues. She somehow manages to remain a perpetual late teenager, forever falling in love with charming young Asian men without understanding very much about them.

The two characters again solve a variety of odd mysteries by using native wit, instinct and a sometimes devious means. The mysteries themselves aren’t cunningly devised so it’s possible that readers more astute than me might solve most of them long before Wong and McQuinnie. But I’ve always been a bit slow when it comes to solving mysteries.

Nevertheless what makes these two books so readable is the witty authorial comment, the quite un-PC view Vittachi has of his fellow Asians, and a delightful playfulness with the English language. And at the beginning of each chapter is an extract from Wong’s ongoing masterwork: Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom. The Zen-type writing here is both humorous and wise.

While The Shanghai Union was full of word play, vivid writing and, had a tidy plot amongst all the mayhem, Mr Wong’s most recent outing, Mr Wong Goes West, sadly lacks most of these qualities.

It’s an unfortunate title, since this book goes west in too many ways. There are a couple of scenes in which the absurdities of language are played around with, there are a few stretches of vivid writing, but in general there’s a feeling of aimlessness about the thing. The characters are blurred rather than sharp; the murder mystery is solved, but without giving us any reason why it was committed in the first place; and the last fifty pages appear to have been tacked on to make an exciting ending. They have little to do with the rest of the story, and again, Mr Vittachi fails to give us a reason why.

Nevertheless, I’ll give the talented Mr Vittachi the benefit of the doubt and hope that the next appearance of C F Wong will be up to scratch.

Photo courtesy of Flickr.com – taken by RaeA