The Feng Shui Detective

I'm reading this series of detective novels by Nury Vittachi. It's not high literature but I find it entertaining.


The stories are actually more comedy than mystery. C.F.Wong, the Feng Shui master, is a veritable scrooge and always looking for ways to earn more consulting fees, all the time penning fables of Eastern wisdom, which provide interludes to the tale, for his magnum opus. He is neatly set off against a teenage intern, Joyce McQuinnie, foisted upon him by a regular client. She is British-Australian but speaks a language called Teenager where Whatever means yes, and As if means no. So the stage is set for the hilarious clash of opposites: East versus West, age versus youth, tradition versus modernity.


The stories are set in Asia, locations such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, with excursions to cities like Sydney. Nury Vittachi lives in Hong Kong, and was a magazine contributor for many years so the behaviour of his colourful characters (we meet some members of The Union of Industrial Mystics), his depiction of the locations, the descriptions of the street food, and the rendering of the patois—snippets of Cantonese, Malay, etc., are spot on. I can't vouch for the Feng Shui bits, but the terminology sounds realistic.


C.F. Wong's observation that there should be more destruction, in the sense of discarding of acquisitions, in the later half of life so that one would move from the material to the spiritual, and end life gloriously unencumbered, appeals to me. I suspect that he was giving voice to a piece of the author's philosophy there.