Returning to Singapore, after the war

 The Angsana Tree Mystery, Ovidia Yu  (TBR shelves, 2024)

This is the eighth book in Ovidia Yu's Crown Colony series of mysteries, this one set in 1946. As soon I saw it was coming out this year, I knew it would be one of my 52 books for 2024. And I see that she has already announced a new one for next year, The Rose Apple Tree Mystery, so there's the first book for my 2025 list.

The first book in this series, The Frangipani Tree Mystery, is set in 1936, with Singapore a British Crown Colony but with Japanese power gathering in the east. The last four books were set during World War II and the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, and they were dark and sometimes difficult to read - not because of the mysterious deaths, though I am sometimes surprised by violent turns in the stories, but because of the brutal treatment of Singapore's residents and the struggles they go through just to survive. Ovidia Yu noted that she drew on her mother's experiences in the war in writing these books.

The Angsana Tree Mystery is the first set after the end of the war. Singapore is again a Crown Colony under British administration, but political change, and upheaval, is in the air with the push for independence from colonial rule in India, Malaya, Burma, spreading across the east. In Singapore, there are tensions as the residents are trying to rebuild from the devastation of the war and occupation, while British administrators reassert their authority. Su Lin has been working with her former boss in the police force, Thomas Le Froy, managing a public health service project. He has been accused of embezzling the funds, so their work is on hold, as is their tentative romance (which honestly, I have a little trouble believing in). Su Lin is bringing some holiday treats for the upcoming Dragon Boat Festival to another family when she finds one of the daughters standing over a dead body. She knows that Mei Mei Pang couldn't have killed the man, and she immediately starts trying both to help her through the shock and to find out who did. Spoiler alert: there are more dead bodies to come.

This is a complicated story, one I sometimes had a little trouble following, but I enjoyed meeting Su Lin and her redoubtable grandmother Chen Tai again. As always I found the Singapore setting fascinating. It is a place I hope to visit some day. This year I also enjoyed Oanh Ngo Usadi's memoir of her U.S family's relocation to Singapore, Hawker Dreams. I look forward to my next fictional visit.

Sir Roderick Glossop

I really enjoyed the first book in this series, The Frangipani Tree Mystery, and I've been looking forward to this second. It starts off in the wake of the Abdication, with a high-profile wedding in Singapore between an American widow and her upper-class English fiancé. Chief Inspector Le Froy, Su Lin's boss at the new Detective and Intelligence Unit, has been asked to provide security for the Glossop-Covington wedding. That's in part because he is an old friend of the groom's father, Sir Roderick Glossop. I almost dropped the book when I read that.

Sir Roderick Glossop is of course a recurring character - and frequent antagonist - in some of my favorite P.G. Wodehouse novels, including Uncle Fred in the Springtime. He has two children in those books, neither of whom apparently went out to Singapore.

Now in addition to watching the mystery play out, I'll be on the loookout for more PGW connections. And I see there is a third book coming out in June, at least in the UK, The Paper Bark Tree Mystery.

A new series from Ovidia Yu, finally available in the U.S.

I was thinking the other day that I haven't seen a new book from Ovidia Yu in a while. When I checked her website, I found a new "Aunty Lee" story, Meddling and Murder. But I also learned that she has a new series, the first two books of which are finally available in the U.S. The summary of the first, The Frangipani Tree Mystery, sent me immediately in search of a copy:

    1936 in the Crown Colony of Singapore, and the British abdication crisis and rising Japanese threat seem very far away. When the Irish nanny looking after Acting Governor Palin's daughter dies suddenly and mysteriously, mission school-educated local girl Su Lin - an aspiring journalist trying to escape an arranged marriage - is invited to take her place.
    But then another murder occurs at the residence and it seems very likely that a killer is stalking the corridors of Government House. It now takes all Su Lin's skills and intelligence to help British-born Chief Inspector Thomas Le Froy solve the murders - and escape with her own life.

Su Lin narrates most of the story, with occasional comments that show she is looking back at the events. "I was to come to know the bungalow on Frangipani Hill very well, but on that long-ago first day I was young and awestruck..." Brief sections also follow Chief Inspector Le Froy, told in the third person, presenting events and conversations that Su Lin learns about later.

I found Su Lin an interesting and sympathetic character straight from the first page, where she is caught between her formidable English mentor (who wants her to take a job with Le Froy) and her very traditional uncle (who has arranged three possible marriages for her).

Knowing Miss Nessa had a soft spot for me, I had asked her to help me find a job. I could not tell her that I longed to be independent like her, and see the world beyond Singapore, so I might have exaggerated my fear of being married off now my schooldays were over. In truth, [my grandmother] Ah Ma might have kept me at home with her to recoup the investment she had made in sending me to learn English reading and writing at the Mission School. I had been considered 'bad luck' since my parents had died from typhoid, and childhood polio had left me with a limp. It had seemed unlikely my family would ever be able to marry me off, but since I was the only child of Ah Ma's favourite son, she had decided to educate rather than sell me. My grandmother's moneylending and black-market businesses had made her rich in the continuing Depression, and she could afford to keep me at home to translate for her, run errands and monitor the household accounts. But grateful though I was to her, the school run by the Mission Centre had opened my eyes to a whole world of possibilities. I wanted more than a lifetime of toil under my grandmother or a mother-in-law. If I was to escape domestic captivity, I would need my own money, which was why I had to find a paying job. (It would have been easier if I had been an English woman rather than a Chinese girl, but I didn't worry about what I couldn't change.)

Su Lin's goal is a career in journalism, inspired by the character Henrietta Stackpole in Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, "whom I had found far more interesting than the book's heroine." She takes the position with the Palins in part out of compassion for their daughter Deborah, at seventeen only a year older than Su Lin, but due to brain damage from an illness mentally a child of seven or so. But Su Lin is also motivated by curiosity, to know what happened to the dead woman, Charity Byrne, an orphan like Su Lin but with no other family. Inspector Le Froy, "known for his willingness to work with - and against - men of any race, language or religion," does discriminate against women. "In the newspapers he had been quoted as saying that the police force would never employ female officers because it was impossible to work with irrational persons." It's lovely to see his prejudices breaking down in the face of Su Lin's intelligence, competence, and compassion. "It was his first inkling of how tough a practical female can be."

There is so much to enjoy in this story, both the setting and the fascinating mix of peoples. Su Lin's best friend from school is Parshanti, whose British mother and Indian father put the family in a complicated, uneasy place in the community. Like Su Lin, Parshanti's options are limited now that her schooling is ended. Her father, a doctor, has trouble finding patients so he works with the police on forensics. Perhaps she will end up helping Su Lin in the cases to come!

A catering job turns deadly

Aunty Lee's Deadly Specials, Ovidia Yu

This is the second mystery to feature Rosie "Aunty" Lee, a lady of a certain age who owns a café in Singapore, Aunty Lee's Delights.  There she cooks traditional Peranakan dishes, while also experimenting with new foods and techniques.  She is nearly as interested in crime as she in cooking.  I read the first book, named for her café, earlier this year and enjoyed it very much (my review is here).  When I saw that a sequel was coming out in the fall, I put my order in.  I had hoped to review this for the R.I.P. Challenge, but a streaming cold last week left me too exhausted in the evenings to write coherently.

The "deadly specials" of the title are a traditional dish called buah keluak, made from the seeds of kepayang tree, which I learned is a type of mangrove.  The golf ball-sized seeds contain cyanide, as does the entire plant.  But the seeds can be treated to removed the poison, in a complicated process that involves boiling and burying and digging up and soaking - essentially fermenting them.  Once treated, they can be added whole to recipes, or made into a paste that is cooked within the seed's shell.  Both the seeds and the dishes that use them take a lot of preparation, and there can be an element of risk if the seeds aren't properly treated.

As the story opens, Aunty Lee has been hired to cater a brunch for the Sung family, to celebrate their daughter Sharon's new partnership in her mother's law firm.  Mabel Sung has specifically ordered buah keluak, which Aunty Lee serves in a chicken curry.  Mabel prepares a plate of food to take to her son Leonard, who has returned from the United States seriously ill, some say dying.  She is clearly distracted, as are her daughter Sharon and husband Henry, a doctor.  Aunty Lee overhears some interesting conversations among the guests, including another doctor, Edmond Yong, and a prayer group whose members have had special surgeries, cosmetic and rejuvenating, in private clinics.

Then Mabel Sung and her son are found in his room, both dead, surrounded by buah keluak shells. As the caterer, Aunty Lee immediately comes under suspicion, though everyone else who ate her food is fine. The police close her café to look for evidence, even before a series of complaints are filed against her food by the Sungs and their prayer-group friends.  Aunty Lee doesn't need the money from the café, but she does need the work and the busyness.  With her assistant Nina, she begins to investigate the Sungs, asking questions about both the law firm and the prayer groups that Mabel ran.  She wonders too about another death, that of a young man from China, who came to Singapore to sell one of his kidneys, part of a busy black market in organ trafficking.

I thought this was a very interesting mystery, both for its setting and its story.  In an interview I read, Ovidia Yu compared Aunty Lee to Lucy Eyelesbarrow, from Agatha Christie's 4.50 from Paddington.  Here I thought she was more in the Miss Marple mode, deliberately playing a slightly-addled older lady who wanders around, asking questions and poking into things with Nina.  Despite the accusations against her, she still has the police on her side, including Police Commissioner Raja and an officer from her local station, Senior Staff Sergeant Salim. They follow the letter of the law in shutting down her business, and then do everything they can on the side to help her.

I have not yet been to any of Houston's Indonesian restaurants.  I am tempted to see if they have buah keluak on their menus.  According to one website I found, it is an acquired taste, "a rich, earthy, botanically bitter-yet-nutty flavour that’s almost reminiscent of a good single origin dark chocolate."  (You can read more here, including a recipe.)  Ovidia Yu includes a simpler version at the back of the book, a curry using candlenuts or macadamias.

I have certainly acquired a taste for these books, and not to sound greedy, but I hope there will be more stories of Aunty Lee, Nina and the café to come.

Aunty Lee investigates

Aunty Lee's Delights, Ovidia Yu

The subtitle of this book is "A Singaporean Mystery."  It was recommended to me in the comments on a post I wrote about another book set in Singapore, Kirstin Chen's Soy Sauce for Beginners, and now I'm passing the recommendation on.  Ovidia Yu is a new author to me, though according to the author's note she is one of Singapore's most prominent writers, with thirty plays produced, as well as fiction and non-fiction books.  These include other mysteries, but this seems to be the first published in America.  It is the start of a series, with a second book coming out later this month (I have already my pre-order in).

The Aunty of the title is Rosie Lee, who runs a small café called Aunty Lee's Delights.

It was well-known for good traditional Peranakan food and famous for the achar and sambals Aunty Lee had been selling out of her house for years. Aunty Lee's Delights was also equipped with the latest modern equipment.  Though she was revered for cooking the traditional standards, strange dishes occasionally popped up because Aunty Lee loved experimenting.  In her view, anything cooked with local ingredients was local food.  In fact the shop was very like Aunty Lee herself.  Another passion of hers was reverse engineering dishes (and occasionally people) to figure out how they had come about and how they might be better adjusted.  She called her kitchen her laboratory for DIY-CSI, the television in there testifying to her two passions, for food and news.

Though I had no idea what Peranakan food was, let alone achar, I took to Aunty Lee right off.  She is "of certain age and even more certain girth."  Recently widowed after marrying later in life, with no children of her own but two adult step-children, she has focused on the café as a distraction from her grief.  But as much as she enjoys the work, she is starting to get a little bored.  When the body of a young woman is discovered on the beach near a prominent tourist hotel and casino, Aunty Lee quickly becomes obsessed with the victim.

While she and her assistant Nina discuss the case, they are also preparing for a dinner to be held at the café that night.  Her step-son Mark is trying to start a wine-importing business, and the dinners pairing his wine with Aunty Lee's food are designed to draw business.  That night one of the guests never shows up, a young woman named Laura Kwee.  Instead, another young woman arrives, asking for Laura.  And then still another young woman goes missing.  Aunty Lee suspects that they are all connected.  She begins asking questions, drawing on her connections in Singapore society, which include Police Commissioner Raja.  He assigns a young police officer, Senior Staff Sergeant Salim, both to assist and guard her.

In an interview with fellow mystery author Louise Penny, printed in the back of the book, Ms. Yu says that "I owe my existence as it is to Agatha Christie's books," because "It was through her books that I first fell in love with reading..."  She goes on to say that Miss Marple is less the inspiration for Aunty Lee than Lucy Eyelesbarrow of 4.50 from Paddington.  Aunty Lee is such fun to read about, though some of the characters find her a bit exhausting at times.  She has enormous energy and insatiable curiosity, but also a great kindness for people.  She feeds everyone, with exactly what they need - and not just with the food that she prepares.  As she tells one young woman,

"I feel responsible for the people I feed.  Once my food has gone into them and become part of them and their lives, I become part of their lives.  In a way I love them  . . .   You say it's not my business, but all hungry people are my business."

A major thread in this story is the treatment of gays and lesbians, in public and private.  In a country that is notoriously homophobic, with anti-gay laws, Aunty Lee is open and accepting.  When people repeat anti-gay slurs to her, she challenges them, often with some version of "Who are we to judge?"  Reading this, I did wonder what the authorities in Singapore might think of a prominent author subverting their social policies through her books.  There are other suggestions of darker edges to life in Singapore.  Nina, Aunty Lee's assistant, is originally from the Philippines.  Selina, Aunty Lee's snippy daughter-in-law, is very rude to her (and she isn't all that polite to her step-mother either).  Nina knows "only too well that most employers in Singapore regarded their live-in domestic help with great suspicion."  There are hints that she was mistreated by her previous employers, perhaps even held in domestic slavery.  Aunty Lee is actually breaking the law by having Nina work in the café, since foreign workers are forbidden to work except as "Domestic Helpers" in the home.

For a while I wondered if the annoying Selina might become a victim (or the killer, for that matter), but that was really wishful thinking.  The mystery plot in this story fits neatly together - though I admit I lost track of the investigation.  I was caught up more in the characters, in their different lives and the way their stories intersected, revolving around the café where Aunty Lee and Nina spend so much of their time.  I am looking forward to their next adventure.  I'm sure we'll be seeing more of SSS Salim as well.  And I need to re-read 4.50 from Paddington.