CRIME DOES PAY
Ovidia Yu tells James Kidd how she uses her detective novels to explore injustices – and vent her anger at the world
Whenever Ovidia Yu completes a book, she buys an orchid for the patio garden at her home in Singapore. So far there are four flowers, including a small bloom she bought after finishing a short story. “It is something to remember them by. I am not very good with plants, and I am learning as I go along. Same with writing. You keep everything going, everything alive.”
This literary hothouse barely scratches the surface of Yu’s body of work. “I only began a few books ago,” she admits. There are already four instalments of Yu’s popular and enormously enjoyable “Aunty Lee” crime series (including the new episode, Meddling and
Murder), set in contemporary Singapore and starring her culinary-wiz-turned-amateur-sleuth protagonist. Her writing for the theatre is even more impressive, spanning three decades and no less than 24 plays.
In conversation, the 56-yearold offers a fair approximation of her work – lively and erudite, unfailingly modest yet self-confident, as when she explains her distrust of interviews: “It is probably an impostor syndrome. I do not think I have anything interesting to say. Everything I want to say I have said in the writing. If we need to talk, I have failed, or you are looking for something more that does not exist.”
Yu’s newest piece of writing is The Frangipani Tree Mystery, the first in a new series is set in Singapore in 1936. Her heroine is Su Lin, an unassuming but brilliantly observant young Chinese-Singaporean who is drawn into a murder mystery involving the bumptious British governor, Sir Henry Palin.