The Feng Shui Detective


The Feng Shui Detective is a series of comedy-crime novels by Nury Vittachi.
Originally started on Hongkong.com as a community-contributed short story, the published books started to appear in Hong Kong in 2000, but since have been printed around the world in multiple languages.

Overview

The Feng Shui Detective follows CF Wong, a feng shui master living in Singapore, who is forced to take on a young Australian assistant named Joyce McQuinnie. Expecting to be moving furniture, she discovers that Wong specializes in the feng shui of crime scenes. Understanding between the two is difficult - Wong speaks pidgin English, augmented by idioms learned from a textbook, and tends to be sexist, racist, money-oriented, and likes to eat small animals ; Joyce, on the other hand, speaks in impenetrable youth argot and is a politically correct vegetarian.
There are five books in the series. They have also been numerous short tales about the same characters, which have appeared in magazines in China. The stories are widely seen as allegories of East and West ideologies and practices. Although the main characters are suspicious of each other and find it almost impossible to communicate, resolution is only possible when they work together.

Published novels

  1. The Feng Shui Detective
  2. The Feng Shui Detective Goes South
  3. The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook
  4. The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics
  5. Mr. Wong Goes West