Book review: “Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder”

Posted on | Saturday, August 20, 2011 | No Comments

Book review: “Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder”

Tall, dark and handsome. An IQ of a genius. A hit among the ladies. Shamini Flint's Inspector Singh is none of these. In fact, he is a portly, sweaty, middle-aged Singaporean who's never without his grubby white sneakers. Such is Flint's hero of her debut crime novel “Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder”.
Life is no bed of roses for the maverick Inspector, who is sent to Kuala Lumpur by his superiors to investigate the murder of Alan Lee, a high-profile Malaysian businessman with a Singaporean ex-wife. Chelsea Liew, the wife and ex-model, is on death row for the murder and swears she didn't kill her ex-husband although the evidence is stacked against her. Juxtaposed against this theme are two sub-plots involving environmental degradation by the timber business run by the Lee family, as well as one involving Liew's possibly losing her kids due to her ex-husband's secret conversion to Islam.

Fortunately, Flint's writing style is engaging and humourous in parts, which neither detracts from or obscures the main plot, namely the solving of Alan Lee's murder. Inspector Singh grows on you, you can't help but root for him throughout the book as both time and the Malaysian police work against his efforts to solve the crime. Flint's novel is by no means a heart-stopping page-turner, but it's a fun and interesting read nevertheless.
On to the brickbats. As a Malaysian, I caught myself more than once raising an eyebrow at Flint's paltry attempts at injecting local colour in the novel. There are hints of white elephants and corruption in the Malaysian police force, but very little mention of the positives about the Malaysian cultural landscape, or the Singaporean one, for the matter. It's as if Flint got so caught up in telling the story she forgot to focus on the charming little quirks of Malaysian people and life. This is something I've always admired about female crime writers such as P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, so I was a little dissappointed at Flint's negative and often unnecessary criticisms of Malaysian ways. The result is that Flint's otherwise interesting novel ends up being a slightly superficial attempt at the Asian mystery genre.
That aside, there's no denying that Flint's novel is a very good attempt at giving the global reading public a glimpse into the Malaysian and Singaporean, albeit a few flaws. The book is worth a second read and has piqued my interest enough to read the rest of her Inspector Singh books.

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