Christopher huang has always enjoyed whodunits
Montreal author Christopher Huang has always enjoyed an old school whodunit
“I don’t feel I have a standard way of attacking all this just yet. It’s still early.”
It’s not every day that a writer admits to being nervous at the start of an interview. But then, few writers achieve the vertical career liftoff that Christopher Huang is experiencing. The Singapore-born Montrealer’s debut novel, A Gentleman’s Murder (Inkshares, 352 pages, $19.99), set in post-First World War England, has not only caused an international buzz among mystery readers since its late-July publication, but has been optioned for development into an American-produced TV series. So let’s forgive the fellow some butterflies.
An only child whose parents separated when he was young (his father was an engineer, his mother a nurse), Huang grew up with English the first language in the home; he spoke Cantonese with his grandmother (“I never quite got the hang of it”) and went to an English school. Moving to Calgary with his mother when he was 17, he did his final year of high school there, then returned to Singapore for his two years of mandatory military service.
“It was either that or risk never being able to go back,” he recalled. “And besides, it taught me a lot. I really feel like it made me a better person, helped me grow up. I learned things like responsibility, and that not everybody grows up in the same environment I did. I had always assumed there was a single road in life, but apparently there were others.”
His road took him back to Canada by 1996. “I remember sitting in the army barracks in Singapore waiting to hear which side had won the (1995) referendum.” Huang studied architecture at McGill, and ended up staying for more than a decade with the firm he had apprenticed for as an undergrad. “It was mostly domestic architecture, not especially exciting,” he recalled. “But they were a great firm. They treated me like family.”
All that time, though, Huang maintained a passion he had nurtured since childhood for English mystery novels, thinking that eventually he would write his own.
“It was always in my mind that at some point I would retire (from architecture) and focus (on writing),” he said. What he thought might happen at 50 instead happened 10 years ahead of schedule, when he was laid off.
“The whole puzzle aspect really attracted me,” Huang said of his affinity for the golden-age whodunit. “The idea of a game — you don’t know who did it, you have all these possibilities, and over the course of the story or game you’re on the lookout for indications. The focus on motivation appeals to me, too. It’s fascinating to see how the ordinary things that drive people can escalate to something as drastic as murder.”
In its early stages, the book that was to become A Gentleman’s Murder featured a conventionally English detective; it was only on the suggestion of an editor that he became half-Asian. Eric Peterkin thus negotiates a landscape Sherlock Holmes never knew, one where his very identity is the subject of contention and opprobrium.
“In the beginning you’re trying to recreate this thing that you love, and in my case that thing was written at a time when just about everybody (in England) was white, and almost everyone writing was writing about the white experience,” Huang said. “The change worked well, but he’s a character I want to be able to send into all kinds of situations, and making him all Chinese would have got in the way of that. So I compromised.”
Mystery fiction, for all its pleasures, is not always the place to go for a rounded sense of period and surrounding culture: read an average English mystery set in the 1920s and you’d be hard pressed to know that the recent Great War had been anything more than an inconvenient scuffle, if it gets mentioned at all. Huang ’s innovation is to take the genre template and incorporate themes — race being one, the psychic toll of war another — seldom acknowledged the first time around.
“I wasn’t noticing much about PTSD, or shell shock as it was then called, in what I was reading,” said Huang. “So I thought, ‘I’m going to put some in.’ Gradually it worked its way into the foreground.”
It’s a subject that is not about to go away, as Huang stresses.
“You can’t prevent trauma; you can’t prevent bad things from happening to good people. And there’s always that element of pride — nobody wants to be the one who fell victim to something. When you get damaged, often the reaction is to feel that you’re less than what you were before, as opposed to just different.”
Bringing ideas like that into an upper-crust 1920s drawing room — or in this case a club for officerclass veterans — is a delicate balancing act, one that wouldn’t have worked without solid command of the genre that’s being tweaked and subverted. Rest assured, A Gentleman’s Murder will scratch all the important itches. The publication’s timing, in the run-up to the centennial of the Armistice and at a juncture where xenophobia is making a comeback via Brexit and Trump, was completely unplanned, if zeitgeist-appropriate.
“I wanted to write a good story that people would enjoy,” said Huang. “But the world sneaks in. Things that you believe in are going to find their way into whatever you write. One hopes that this thing that was planned as a happy diversion could end up doing some good in the world.”
Asked about the book’s mooted incarnation on the small screen — a process Huang will have input in as a script collaborator — and how fast it has all been happening, Huang paused before choosing a word that might have come straight from the mouth of one of his gentleman characters.
“Gobsmacked. That’s the scientific term, I believe.”
Nervousness, you get the feeling, will take care of itself soon enough.