crime
&
mystery
Korean Crime Novels
“The Next Big Thing”?
by J. Madison Davis
I
n his address to the International
Association of Crime Writers 2013
meeting in Oxford, Christopher
MacLehose commented that publishers like
him are always looking for the “next big
thing” for mystery readers. The “big thing”
at that time was “Scandi noir.” Building on
the success of Henning Mankell’s Wallander
series and Stieg Larsen’s The Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo, a tidal wave of Scandinavian
noir had surged into British and American
translation, and continues to, as more and
image: neyro2008 / 123rf stock photo
more Scandinavian authors reach our book-
stores. An author with a Nordic name and a
certain style is automatically of interest to
publishers of translations. Inevitably, these
unpredictable tides rise and fall. The simi-
larities of any form can become too familiar
or the quality diminish as more peripheral
writers and imitators exploit its popular-
ity. What a society finds compelling may
change, and readers weary of authors’ tricks
and become restless for something different:
“the next big thing.”
At the time of his address, MacLehose
believed that the next wave would come
from France. Pierre Lemaitre’s shocking
thriller Alex had made a big splash, and
the French were revitalizing their style of
noir through inspiration from Mediterra-
nean writers like Jean-Claude Izzo. Lemai-
tre’s next translations, Camille and Irène,
were also successes; however, despite the
long history of innovation and influence
in the French crime novel—from Émile
Gaboriau to Georges Simenon to Didier
Daeninckx—a new wave seems not to
have materialized. The Wall Street Journal
appears to have been a little more prescient
in 2010, predicting Japan as the next “hot
WORLDLIT.ORG 13
crime & mystery korean crime novels
spot.” To the stereotypical geographically impaired
American, the distinctions between Finns and Nor-
wegians is often obscure, and the differences among
Far Eastern cultures are even more vague. Asian crime
writers, however, are currently attracting much more
attention than they ever have. The Far East just isn’t
as far as it used to be. Asian culture and settings have
become more than merely colorful clichés among
English-language writers familiar with these nations.
There are many examples. Chinese American author
Lisa See’s Dragon Bones (2003) blends Chinese his-
tory into a murder mystery at the Three Gorges Dam.
Francie Lin’s The Foreigner (2008), set in Taiwan, won
a Best First Novel Edgar. Adam Johnson’s The Orphan
Master’s Son (2012), set in North Korea, won the Pulit-
zer Prize. Now residing in Oklahoma, immigrant Vu
Tran portrayed the experiences of Vietnamese refugees
The Far East just isn’t as far as it used to be.
in the form of a highly praised detective novel, Dragon-
fish (2015). Qiu Xiaolong, born in Shanghai, now lives
in St. Louis and is also an Edgar winner. His series of
nine Inspector Chen Cao novels since 2000 has sold
millions of copies (see WLT, Jan. 2012, 23–27). Each
of these writers, and several others, has contributed to
making readers more receptive to trying out translated
Asian crime writing.
To the surprise of many readers, however, recently
much attention has turned toward the inventive range
of authors from South Korea, and several translations
in particular have gathered much literary recogni-
tion. The Vegetarian, by Han Kang, and its translator
Deborah Smith, won the Man Booker International
Prize for 2016 (see WLT, May 2016, 62–67). A short
J. Madison Davis is novel that has the surreal quality, it seems to me, of
the author of eight many works by Japanese author Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, it
mystery novels, turns the simple act of a woman’s choosing vegetarian-
including The Murder ism into a destructive challenge to her husband and
of Frau Schütz, an traditional family. Japanese fiction is popular and
Edgar nominee, influential in South Korea. Publishers enthusiastically
and Law and Order: seek the translation rights to crime authors such as
Dead Line. He has Keigo Higashino and Kotaro Isaka. Japan, long a major
also published seven player in crime fiction, probably had a significant role
nonfiction books in drawing English readers’ attention to other Asian
and dozens of short authors in the last two decades with novels like those
stories and articles, of Natsuo Kirino and Tetsuya Honda.
including his crime Please Look After Mom, by Kyung-Sook Shin,
and mystery column was another novel that helped Korean writers break
in WLT since 2004. through the language barrier. It won the 2011 Man
14 WLT MARCH – APRIL 2017
Asian Literary Prize (along with translator Chi-Young
Kim) after selling over a million copies in Korea in
less than a year and many more in translation after
Oprah Winfrey blessed it. Minutely examining the
relationship of a mother to her children and husband,
it also confronts the duty of obligation to family, to the
point that it was compared to Stella Dallas and Mil-
dred Pierce, as being weepy and overly melodramatic.
“Kimchee-scented Kleenex fiction,” Maureen Corrigan
said notoriously on NPR, causing an uproar. However,
Shin’s novel became a best-seller despite unusual stylis-
tic tricks that are not usually a part of best-sellerdom,
like telling the story in multiple points of view and
using mostly second-person narration.
Also known for his inventive use of style is Kim
Young-ha, the author of I Have the Right to Destroy
Myself, which introduced him to a global audience
in French translation in 1996. It is the story of a love
triangle involving two brothers but exposes a perverse
obsession with suicide and hidden desires. Kim began
writing after serving in the military for two years as an
assistant detective and is highly prolific. He has over
two dozen novels currently being translated despite
his being under fifty years of age. In 2004 Kim swept
the three most important Korean literary awards and
established a reputation as the most talented young
Korean author. He often incorporates crime-writing
elements, and the word “noir” frequently pops up in
commentaries about his work. Your Republic Is Calling
You (translated in 2006), for example, sets the stage
for a spy thriller and takes place in a twenty-four-hour
period. Yet, like all the best spy fiction, it raises much
larger questions. A deep-cover North Korean agent has
lived in the south for half of his life, having last heard
from his superiors more than a decade ago. He is lead-
ing a normal life—he has married and has a daugh-
ter—but he receives a mysterious unexpected email
leading him to orders from his handlers to return to
Pyongyang. He has no idea why. He cannot even be
certain that the message is genuine. Could it be a trap?
It could simply be the end of his mission, whatever it
was, or it could be that he has been judged unfit and
will return to his execution.
More conventional Korean crime writers are also
getting translated. J. M. (Jung-myung) Lee is an excep-
tional one of these. He has sold millions of copies in
Korea and been adapted for television. He has earned

growing enthusiasm in translation since the appearance
of The Investigation, translated by Chi-Young Kim and
chosen a 2015 “top pick in mystery” by Vanity Fair. The
impact of World War II still resonates powerfully in
Korean society, where, for example, the issue of “com-
fort women” is still controversial. There was virtually
no interruption between the Japanese colonial period,
struggles for independence, World War II, and the
partition of the peninsula, which all must seem like a
multigenerational nightmare. The Investigation centers
on a main character who serves the Japanese empire
as a prison guard during the war. When one of the
other guards (nicknamed “The Butcher”) is murdered,
Watanabe Yuichi is assigned to investigate and finds a
poem in the victim’s pocket. The Butcher, it turns out,
had a literary penchant and had become a friend of
prisoner and poet Yun Dong-ju, a character based on
a real Korean poet. This allows Lee, to greater or lesser
effect depending on your taste, to weave in Yun Dong-
ju’s poems and introduce English readers to his writing
while the mystery is being solved.
Lee’s latest publication in the US is The Boy Who
Escaped Paradise (2016), also translated by Chi-Young
Kim. Ahn Gil-mo, an autistic math genius, is connected
to a murder in New York City and, because he escaped
from a labor camp in North Korea, is investigated by
Perhaps the “next big thing” is not an issue of
nationality but rather being open to allowing
authors to blend and merge their own unique
qualities and cultural assets into the variegated
flow of world culture.
a CIA agent who tries to grasp his unusual thought
processes. Through a week of questioning and a series
of mathematical puzzles, Gil-mo reveals a number
of crimes he was involved in during his long journey
from imprisonment in Korea, through China and
Mexico, and into New York. In many ways Gil-mo,
with his unusual ways of seeing reality, becomes a
Prince Myshkin kind of idiot, revealing the world for
what it really is, if we only had the simpleness to see it.
Another “Korean” crime novel earning much atten-
tion on its publication in 2003 was The Interpreter, a
first novel by Suki Kim, and I mention it for a par-
ticular reason. The story of a courtroom interpreter in
New York City who seeks to solve the mystery of her
parents’ murder five years before, Suzy Park’s search in
the shadows of the community’s underground culture
becomes an odyssey of the self, another examination
of the Korean themes of familial duty and identity.
Why I single it out, however, is because it occurs in the
context of immigration. The main character is torn
between cultures. Like the author, she was born in
Korea but raised in the United States.
Kim has written for the New York Times, Harper’s,
and other periodicals. Her first book, Without You,
There Is No Us, was nonfiction, based on her experienc-
es undercover teaching English to the children of North
Korea’s ruling class. Should we consider her a Korean
author or an American author or some sort of chimera?
Does it matter? Perhaps the “next big thing” is not an
issue of nationality but rather being open to allowing
authors to blend and merge their own unique qualities
and cultural assets into the variegated flow of world
culture. Isn’t this what has been happening in crime
writing? American noir becomes a different shade of
noir in Scandinavia and then returns through France
and Britain and Japan to change the color of American
noir. The inventiveness and styles of the Korean crime
fiction coming to us seem to offer a whole new palette.
Palymra, Virginia
WORLDLIT.ORG 15
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