Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

Fans of the hit tv cop drama Rizzoli and Isles could be excused for not knowing that the series is an Asian American product. The show -- whose twist on the basic police procedural is the friendship between a traumatized policewoman and an OCD medical coroner -- is based on a popular mystery series by Chinese American M.D. Tess Gerritsen, which until now has featured no Asian American protagonists.

Gerritsen joined the crime fiction world 23 novels ago with a medical procedural, and has continued to leverage her expertise in her fiction. She developed the Rizzoli (detective) and Isles (coroner) characters in separate novels, before bringing them together in a winning formula. Her latest book in the series, The Silent Girl, is her first novel featuring Asian American characters -- and it shows.

The Silent Girl sends Rizzoli and Isles in to investigate a murder in Boston's Chinatown, where they find -- wait for it -- monkey hairs on the victim's body. Chapters in the third-person, mystery-novel mode alternate with a first-person narrator whose identity isn't immediately clear, and whose language has too much ching-chong diction for my taste. The mysterious narrator hints at superhuman martial arts and Chinese mythology. Add to that a perp who doesn't show up on surveillance footage, a woo-woo tone, and scenes of fog and nighttime, and we're offered the possibility that sumpin' supernatural's goin' on. That's right, the Monkey King is a suspect.

The clues lead us to a decades-old Chinatown mass murder, and a whiff of that crime-drama standby, a serial killer. No, wait, a serial killer who prefers teenaged girls. Can I just register here my utter weariness of crime fiction that continues to torture, rape, and murder attractive young women for the increasingly tired jizz of a jaded audience? I cry foul. A woman writing women protagonists has even less excuse, especially in a novel with no less than four "kickass" lead women characters.

In spite of (or, to be fair, perhaps because of) this lame formula, Gerritsen's long experience in the genre comes through in a tightly paced, well-plotted story. But her use of Boston's tiny Chinatown, a pair of preternaturally skilled female martial arts masters, and a view of Chinese Americans that can only be called exotic, sets Asian American literature back as many years as it purportedly takes to soak a tea egg. It also busts this novel out of the world of unrealistic, but plausible, American crime fiction, leaking Big Trouble in Little China and Hong Kong wire stunt kung fu into a context where they don't belong.

This is what comes from reaching for tropes and clichés rather than experience: I don't see murder, mayhem, or drunken-master stylings on Gerritsen's resume. But maybe she just doesn't know how to make her medical-school-graduatin', out-marryin', model-minority background interesting enough to keep a mystery audience riveted -- although there's definitely room for such in a standard crime fiction.

But then, maybe she can learn. Her upcoming novel apparently builds off of The Silent Girl. Let's hope she leaves the grasshoppers and joss sticks at home next time.