SJ Rozan: The Shanghai Moon

Description

With The Shanghai Moon, S. J. Rozan returns to her award-winning, critically acclaimed, and much-loved characters Lydia Chin and Bill Smith in the first new novel in the series in seven years. Estranged for months from fellow P.I. Bill Smith, Chinese-American private investigator Lydia Chin is brought in by colleague and former mentor Joel Pilarsky to help with a case that crosses continents, cultures, and decades. In Shanghai, excavation has unearthed a cache of European jewelry dating back to World War II, when Shanghai was an open city providing safe haven for thousands of Jewish refugees. The jewelry, identifed as having belonged to one such refugee - Rosalie Gilder - was immediately stolen by a Chinese official who fled to New York City. Hired by a lawyer specializing in the recovery of Holocaust assets, Chin and Pilarsky are to find any and all leads to the missing jewels.However, Lydia soon learns that there is much more to the story than they've been told: The Shanghai Moon, one of the world's most sought after missing jewels, reputed to be worth millions, is believed to have been part of the same stash. Before Lydia can act on this new information, two men are murdered, Lydia is fired from the case, and Bill Smith finally reappears on the scene. Now Lydia and Bill must unravel the truth about the Shanghai Moon and the events that surrounded its disappearance sixty years ago during the chaos of war and revolution, if they are to stop more killings and uncover the truth of what is going on today.

Q & A:

Q: Woo-hoo! Lydia and Bill are back! We were afraid they were gone forever. Why did you decide to return to the series?

A: I’d never intended to leave it. After Sept. 11 I felt I had to write the book that became ABSENT FRIENDS. Working on that got me intrigued with the multi-voice novel. That’s a format that I thought wouldn’t work for Lydia and Bill, because they each narrate in the first person. For a long time I’d wanted to explore issues of politics, real estate and crime as they intersect in New York City. So I wrote IN THIS RAIN. When I’d finished that I was as anxious as anyone to find out what Lydia and Bill had been up to.

Q: You say you didn’t think the multi-voice novel would work for Lydia and Bill, but in THE SHANGHAI MOON we hear many voices.

A: Well, yes, that’s true. I hadn’t intended to do that. In fact I was excited to be getting back to the one-narrator novel, which has its own advantages and challenges. But I found it wasn’t working to set part of the story in the Shanghai Ghetto during WWII if all I used was Lydia’s present-day perspective. To bring it to life I needed voices from that time.

Q: Thus the letters, diary entries, naval intelligence reports?

A: Exactly: thus. If the reader was going to care about these people and their stolen jewels, I had to bring them all to life, to make them characters with whom the reader would want to be involved.

Q: Many people are unaware there was a Jewish ghetto in Shanghai in that time. How did you learn about it and why did you decide to use it?

A: I can’t remember when I first heard about it, which probably means it seeped into my consciousness when I was young. I’d never thought much about it, though. The way the book came about was, I’d decided to focus this Lydia book on jewelry.

Q: The way you focused A BITTER FEAST on Chinese restaurants, and CHINA TRADE on museums?

A: Exactly. But having a focus doesn’t give you a story. I was kicking around in my head the nature of jewelry, what it is that grabs people – what it was that grabbed me -- and what floated to the top were two things: it’s valuable, and it’s passed down through generations. As opposed to, say, art or furniture, people tend to hold onto their parents’ jewelry out of sentiment as much as for its value. So the idea began to grow, someone who had been unable to hold onto emotionally precious jewelry. And then there’s obsession. At the end of THE MALTESE FALCON, when people go running off yet again in search of something that’s already caused so many deaths, and that they’re unlikely ever to find... I’m not a collector so I don’t really understand that, and therefore it fascinates me.

So I’m mulling all this over one day, and, like the missing link, into my head pops the Shanghai ghetto. Nothing particular about it, just that it existed. Which, in truth, was almost all I knew. I’ve been at this long enough, though, to know it didn’t appear at that moment for no reason. I dug into the possibilities the setting presented, and the book started to take shape.

Q: If you knew almost nothing about the Shanghai ghetto, you must have done a lot of research, because the book’s full of detail from that time.

A: I did. I love research. I started reading histories of Shanghai, and memoirs of people who’d lived in the ghetto. I spoke to some of those people, and found their websites and the websites maintained by the Shanghainese and Chinese authorities. As usual with research, one thing would lead me to another, and then to another. It was thrilling to uncover the astonishing, rich history of that time. My main problem became how to make sure the information I needed got into the book without all the thousand other facts each item led to – facts that are hopelessly enthralling, but not all relevant. It made me want to go back to the subject someday and write a vast, sprawling, multi-character James Michener type historical novel.

Q: You think you will?

A: If you don’t tell my agent.

Q: Will it be next?

A: No, I’m working now on a new Bill Smith book.

Q: Can you tell us about it?

A: Too soon.

Q: Its name?

A: Seems to be too soon for that, too. My books usually have names when they start out, but not this one.

Q: That doesn’t worry you?

A: Of course it does. What is there that doesn’t worry me? But about this, there’s nothing I can do.

Q: Good luck.

A: Thanks.

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