Taipei Noir: Chi Wei-Jan's 'Private Eyes'

Wu Cheng, a disillusioned playwright and theatre director in his mid-forties, quits his job as a college professor. He is angry at Taipei, he is angry at himself, and most of all, he is angry at his anger. He has left his wife, and he has left behind his circle of theatre friends after getting blind drunk and insulting them at a dinner thrown in his honour. In short, he is having a breakdown.

Wu’s response is to move to Liuzhangli, a district in Taipei he fondly describes as the “Dead Zone” because the only thing to thrive there are the funeral businesses. There he sets up shop as the first and only private detective in Taiwan. He is not technology-savvy, and his CV is embarrassingly short. His only marketing strategy is to print a stack of business cards, his only training comes in the form of years spent reading detective fiction and hours spent in cafes observing passersby. All he has to rely on is his obsessive attention to detail honed through years of neurosis and depression.
His first client is Mrs Lin, an attractive middle-aged woman concerned that her teenage daughter has suddenly taken against her husband. It sounds easy enough: either her husband has sexually molested the girl, or her daughter has somehow stumbled upon a clandestine affair between her father and another woman. Wu decides to follow the otherwise seemingly remarkably boring Mr Lin to discover exactly what it is he is hiding. The clues, however, are unforthcoming; his daily walks are just that, daily walks, and he only ever seems to email fellow plant obsessives from his Arbor Club.
That is, until one day Wu sees him getting onto a bus, before stepping off not two stops later and getting into a BMW driven by a young woman. Enlisting the help of a foulmouthed and streetwise taxi driver, they follow the car to a hotel on the outskirts of the city. This must be the affair he has been looking for. But another car pulls into the ‘love motel’ shortly after and before long the two cars have pulled out and set off again. Something doesn’t seem quite right. It doesn’t take Wu long to discover that the young woman works at a local health clinic. The more Wu thinks about it, the more unlikely an affair it seems; surely they are taking too many precautions? And their visits to these ‘love motels’ are perilously short, even for a middle-aged man.

But who is the killer? And how can he be so good at dressing up as and acting like Wu Cheng? A vital clue comes when Zhang, a fellow playwright, makes contact. Can Wu help him find the whereabouts of a young playwright, Su Hongzhi? Uninterested in the case however, Wu declines, more interested in the picture that is emerging of Taiwan’s first serial killer.

By now five murders have taken place and the police are desperate to find a connection. Not only is the murderer seemingly drawing some kind of symbol with his careful plotting of the locations of the murders, but he has also left a clue in Wu’s home; a folded-down page of a Buddhist scripture. As Wu continues to look for someone who might hold a grudge against him, and who would have the acting skills to be able to produce such a convincing costume so as to fool witnesses and CCTV footage, Wu is reminded by his friend Zhang that he once snubbed Su Hongzhi when he came to Wu for writing advice. As the police investigate further it becomes clear that Su Hongzhi could well be their man.

A picture emerges through interviews with family and friends of an unusually cerebral young man with a fanatical passion for Buddhism, and the work of a certain playwright by the name of Wu Cheng. This is a man on a mission to convert Wu, to make him see salvation in the ways of the Buddha. All that remains is to find Su and stop him. What of the young woman who moved into a flat opposite Wu in the Dead Zone around the same time as he did? Could Su be that good at acting? Could the murderer have been that close all along?
Part detective story and part social satire, PRIVATE EYES is a literary tour-de-force that will have you turning the pages until the very end. It is a meditation on the nature of serial killers and an insightful study of the crime genre, but most of all it is about the anxiety, passion, and craziness of urban life.
About the Author

Chi Wei-Jan (b.1954) holds a Ph.D. in English Literature of University of Iowa. He is Professor of Drama and Theatre at National Taiwan University. He is a successful playwright and has written and produced many plays, including MIT: Mad in Taiwan (2008), The Mahjong Game Trilogy (1997-2007), Reel Murders (2005), Utopia, Ltd (2001) and One Bed, Four Players (1999). He has also published several books of essays including Seriously Playful (2004) and Misunderstanding Shakespeare (2008). Private Eyes is his first novel. It became a bestseller in Taiwan and went through five printings in only two months.
Text and images courtesy of The Grayhawk Agency.