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Havana Fever by Leonardo Padura
Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99

Bamboo and Blood by James Church
Thomas Dunne Books, £16.99

ERNEST MANDEL, the Trotskyist intellectual whose seminal work, Late Capitalism, influenced a generation on the left, had an enthusiasm for crime stories matched only by Labour’s inter-war pairing of GDH and Margaret Cole. They wrote crime stories while Mandel analysed their consumption. His book Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story, long out of print, reveals that Bukharin was also a fan and makes the point that revolutionaries don’t lose their zeal by engrossing themselves in the literary battle between establishment and rebel, inevitably concluded with the bourgeoisie triumphant, even if on occasion there is a twist.

One positive consequence of globalisation is in the literary sphere, where there has been an explosion both of popular works in translation and foreign authors writing in English. This is particularly true of the detective genre, where there is now a new niche of communist crime thrillers with series featuring Cuban, Chinese and North Korean detectives.

Leonardo Padura, who writes in Spanish, anchors the fifth outing for his Cuban hero Mario Conde, a former police inspector now making a living trading in second-hand books, around the mysterious death of a famous singer at the end of the Batista era. He ties it into the serendipitous discovery of a fabulous library that any bibliophile would die for, drawing Conde into investigating events half a century before. It’s set in the dark years of dissolution following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, when Russian aid was whipped away and the remaining communist economies were largely left to fend for themselves. In Cuba the period was lean and mean, and in North Korea people starved.

Conde is a patriot bewildered by the spiralling corruption of Cuban society – the pimps, the prostitutes and the drug dealers – but sees those who flee for Miami as deserters. The atmosphere reeks of fine cigars and good food, while the writing is littered with literary allusions and populated by characters such as Skinny Carlos, who is no longer skinny and now stuck in a wheelchair, collateral damage from Cuba’s military adventures in Africa; Tamara, Conde’s childhood love with whom he is finally, but not irrevocably, united; and Rubbish, his long-suffering and much-neglected stray dog.

Chief Inspector Chen Cao has his sixth outing in Qiu Xiaolong’s The Mao Case. Based in Shanghai, Chen is a rising star partly because of his on-off – here it’s pretty off, as she’s just married someone else – relationship with Ling, the child of a senior party cadre, and consequently ends up getting the tricky cases with political overtones. Chen, a published poet – like the author – is sent under the guise of an aspirant novelist to investigate an old painter and a young girl living well above their means. He lives in a smart 1930s mansion playing jazz and holding parties surrounded by a bevy of beautiful young women.

The other target of interest is the granddaughter of Chairman Mao’s dancing partner, a famous film star driven to suicide by a special team of interrogators from the Cultural Revolution group of the central committee of the Communist Party dispatched by a madly jealous Madam Mao. The party thinks her newly-acquired wealth may come from the sale of material about Mao that will undermine the myths underpinning the party’s rule. After Chairman Mao’s personal physician did so much damage, the revelations of a mistress might do even more and Chen’s job is to locate and obtain the material. Internal Security are also on the case, impatient and liable to substitute brawn for brain. Chen has to act quickly, but before he’s got very far another of the entourage is found murdered in the garden. Here it gets complicated as unscrupulous developers and Triads

join in.

Inspector O takes the page for the third time in Bamboo and Blood in the dark depths of North Korea’s “arduous march” of the late 1990s when hundreds of thousands, if not millions, starved. He is given the task of babysitting an Israeli agent visiting Pyongyang but, when the wife of a North Korean diplomat is murdered in Pakistan, O is asked to investigate. It’s all smoke and mirrors with the party’s security getting involved along with O’s estranged brother as James Church – a pseudonym for an American non-proliferation expert who spends a lot of time in Pyongyang – explores the murky and dirty events around the country countertrading their missiles for Pakistan’s knowledge of the highly enriched uranium way to a nuclear weapons state.

All three of the detectives are dissident communists. With his jaundiced parentage O is, unsurprisingly, the least sympathetic to the regime, while Conde and Chen are a little sad at what the world has come to with not enough to consume in Cuba and too much consumerism in China. All three novels have ambiguous conclusions. Any Tribune reader into detective stories will enjoy all three – and learn more about the realities of contemporary communism than from many a distinguished academic treatise.

Glyn Ford