Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Shanghai Murders by David Rotenberg The Shanghai Murders by David Rotenberg. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 6603e8c6cd3b4ac3 • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. The Shanghai Murders by David Rotenberg. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 6603e8c80f2fd6e1 • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. ROTENBERG, David. PERSONAL: Male. Education: University of Toronto, B.A.; Yale University, M.F.A. ADDRESSES: Home— Toronto, Canada. Office— York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3. E-mail— [email protected] CAREER: York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, acting and directing teacher, 1987—. WRITINGS: The Shanghai Murders: A Mystery of Love and Ivory, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1998. The Lake Ching Murders: a Mystery of Fire and Ice, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2002. SIDELIGHTS: An acting and directing teacher in Toronto, David Rotenberg earned critical success with his first novel, The Shanghai Murders. The book, set in contemporary Shanghai, is both a murder mystery and an exploration of cultural differences and rapid social change. It begins when the mutilated corpse of a New Orleans cop is found in a city alley—an event reported in the Shanghai Daily News before police even arrive on the scene. Zhong Fong, head of the city's Special Investigation Unit, suspects from the start that the case could turn into a political scandal of international dimensions. As Fong tracks the case's many puzzling clues, including shards of ivory in the corpse's lungs, he is confronted with painful memories of the death of his adulterous actress wife, Fu Tsong, four years earlier. Rotenberg used his professional familiarity with the stage to develop a subplot about Geoffrey Hyland, a Canadian theatre director and Fu Tsong's former lover, who has returned to Shanghai to direct a Chinese production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Also adding to the novel's complexity are the appearance of ritual killer Loa Wei Fen, the prime suspect in the murder, and the victim's widow Amanda Pitman, who comes to Shanghai to retrieve his body. Many critics gave The Shanghai Murders superlative reviews. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly deemed it "irresistibly exotic," while Library Journal critic Rex E. Klett hailed it as an "awesome" achievement with "a wonderfully nefarious plot." Wes Lukowsky, in Booklist, praised Rotenberg's literary debut with an "extraordinarily accomplished" thriller and especially admired the book's surprising conclusion. Though a critic for Kirkus Reviews felt that Fong did not emerge as a sufficiently interesting character, the writer noted that Rotenberg "scores points for [his] vivid Shanghai sets." In The Lake Ching Murders Zhong Fong is again featured. After spending two years in a Chinese prison, Fong hopes to salvage his career by discovering who killed seventeen people aboard a yacht. The people were not only killed, but were tortured in a hideous way. As many of the dead were not Chinese, it has the potential to develop into an international political situation. Booklist 's Wes Lukowsky called it an "enlightening glimpse into the inner workings of justice in rural China." A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted the twisted plot and called The Lake Ching Murders "sheer entertainment." BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: PERIODICALS. Booklist, July 1998, p. 1866; April 1, 2002, Wes Lukowsky, review of The Lake Ching Murders, p. 1310. Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 1998, p. 782. Library Journal, June 1, 1998, p. 165; March 1, 2002, Rex E. Klett, review of The Lake Ching Murders, p. 144. Publishers Weekly, May 18, 1998, p. 72; January 21, 2002, review of The Lake Ching Murders, p. 67.* Shanghaied into books, you could say. David Rotenberg has gotten a lot more mileage than most travellers out of a single 13-week visit he made to Shanghai in 1995. So far, that lone Chinese sojourn has yielded a five-book series of crime novels centred on the fictional Shanghai inspector Zhong Fong. And now, Rotenberg has published a sprawling, multi-generational historical novel that bears the name of that burgeoning Chinese metropolis. Rotenberg's prodigious productivity becomes all the more impressive when you realize that writing fiction isn't even his day job. "I can write pretty quickly when I get going," says Rotenberg, a theatre director and acting teacher. Rotenberg is on a sabbatical from his post at York University, but maintains his position as artistic director of the Professional Actors Lab, where his students have included Rachel McAdams and Scott Speedman. He also plans to launch the New Ossington Theatre in the fall with his own adaptation of The Great Gatsby . It was in his capacity as theatre director that Rotenberg originally visited Shanghai, having been invited there to direct the first Canadian play ever produced in the People's Republic. He worked with a group of Chinese actors on a Mandarin production of an iconic Canadian stage text, George Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe , a contemporary story of a young Indian woman who leaves the reservation for the big city. It wasn't long before Rotenberg realized that much was lost in the cultural translation. "They didn't comprehend it at all," he recalls. "When the set designs arrived, there were Indians with head dresses and war paint." Other obstacles included postponements in the rehearsal schedule and short working days, all of which left Rotenberg with ample free time to wander the streets of Shanghai at a pivotal moment in its history. "Here was a city that was actively involved in moving from being ignored by the great powers in Beijing to becoming the centre of Asian capitalism," he says. "You could feel it all around you. Some of my actors would leave rehearsals because they were setting up kiosks to sell produce on the street." The Shanghai Murders , the first of the Zhong Fong mysteries, was published in 1998. It was followed by The Lake Ching Murders (2001), The Hua Shan Hospital Murders (2003), The Hamlet Murders (2004) and The Golden Mountain Murders (2005). The author is working with the CBC on an adaptation of the novels for TV. "It would have to be a co-production with either Taiwan or Hong Kong," Rotenberg says. "We'd need a big leading actor like Tony Leung ( Lust, Caution ) or one of those guys who has some real caché on the mainland and in Hong Kong." Around the time the fifth Zhong Fong novel was published, Penguin Canada president and publisher David Davidar approached Rotenberg with an invitation to attempt something larger in scope. "He wanted to know if I could do for Shanghai what James Clavell did for Hong Kong. It gave me pause because I love Clavell's writing." Loading. At nearly 800 pages, Shanghai spans the history of the city from the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century through to the Maoist takeover roughly 100 years later. Mixing fact and fiction, the book is rooted in the story of an Iraqi Jewish family that makes its fortune in the city. Rotenberg likens his approach to a twist on Philip Roth's The Plot Against America , a "counterfactual" historical narrative that imagined a Nazi takeover of the United States in the 1930s. "This goes the other way," he says. "These were the events of Chinese history. But it imagines that the reasons behind those events are different from the ones historians have given. The novel postulates a series of other forces at work." David Rotenberg (Rotenberg, David) More editions of The Shanghai Murders: A Mystery of Love and Ivory: The Shanghai Murders: A Mystery of Love and Ivory: ISBN 9780312181758 (978-0-312-18175-8) Hardcover, St Martins Pr, 1998 The Shanghai Murders: A Mystery of Love and Ivory: ISBN 9781552782668 (978-1-55278-266-8) Softcover, McArthur & Co. Publishing, 2004. Founded in 1997, BookFinder.com has become a leading book price comparison site: Find and compare hundreds of millions of new books, used books, rare books and out of print books from over 100,000 booksellers and 60+ websites worldwide.