Head First

Yellowthread Street #11

by William Marshall

Not even the dead can escape the Resurrection squad.

A Chinese coffin surfaces in Hong Bay. Wrapped in a shroud, a headless body drifts out from under its lacquered lid. Forensics reports that the neck was coated with animal glue. Whatever was stolen from the casket, it was not a human head. Then the grave robbing begins.

There are few crimes the citizens of Hong Bay fear more than the desecration of the dead. Murder only lasts a moment, death is for eternity.

This thrilling instalment of the series, set in the shadow of the Hong Kong handover to the Chinese, Detectives Christopher O’Yee and Harry Feiffer find themselves trapped between clashing cultures: British and Chinese, spies and police, Nationalists and Communists, and of the living and the dead.

The crime fighting duo have solved some of the most bizarre and horrific cases imaginable. This one may prove their darkest yet.

The eleventh book in William Marshall’s classic series is his most political so far, and takes the cops of Yellowthread Street into unfamiliar and dangerous territory.

Praise for the Yellowthread Street series:

“Marshall has the rare gift of juggling scary suspense and wild humor and making them both work.” Washington Post Book World

“Marshall’s style – blending the hilarious, the surreal, and the poignant – remains inimitable and not easily resisted.” San Francisco Chronicle

“Marshall has few peers as an author who melds the wildest comedy and tragedy in narratives of nonstop action.” Publishers Weekly

“Marshall is building a growing, iconoclastic body of work that mixes weird fantasy [and] wayward characterization . . . to produce a subtle, charged, atmospheric, lush fiction hybrid sure to satisfy those with a taste for mysteries on the far edges.” Philadelphia Inquirer

“Despite the wild humor, Marshall’s stories contain excellent police procedure, real suspense, and fine irony . . . incessantly scary.” Chicago Tribune

“Among the best police procedural series on the market.” Detroit Free Press

“As an inspired poet of the bizarre, [Marshall] orchestrates underlying insanity into an apocalyptic vision of the future.” New York Times Book Review

“Marshall’s novels feature seemingly supernatural events that turn out to have logical, if not precisely rational, origins. He has savage fun with police procedure.” TIME

“Nobody rivals Marshall’s ability to expose the links between comic hysteria and the most mundane human foibles, from greed to cowardice to simple funk.” Kirkus Reviews

“Moves at the speed of a bullet; don’t read it aloud or you’ll run out of breath.” Chicago Sun-Times

Genres: Mystery

186 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

William Marshall (or William Leonard Marshall) (born 1944, Australia) is an Australian author, best known for his Hong Kong-based "Yellowthread Street" mystery novels, some of which were used as the basis for a British TV series.

Reviews

[Matthew Beck · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there were any sort of justice in the world, Marshall would be a household name worldwide. He so thoroughly moves beyond what many mysteries confine themselves in terms of character and motivation that his books make so many others seem flat, dry, cardboard, fake. Genius.

[Ralph · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a wonder that the detectives and constables of the Yellowthread Street Constabulary, Hong Bay District, Hong Kong, solve any cases at all. Especially when you consider that their cases are the stuff that nightmares are made of, at least nightmares of sleeping policemen – dismembered inhabitants of coffins used to transport…something out of China, incendiary mail bags investigated by undercover officers afflicted with delusions of Holmes and Watson, fem fatales from the Chinese Secret Service quoting Thoreau over the phone, endangered butterfly wings and dangerous postcards, stealthy killer soldiers stealing from the dead while confronting ghosts and demons, and all the history of Colonial Britain and Communist China intersecting each other on the constabulary’s doorstep. And yet they do solve their cases, gloriously, heroically, and in ways that saner folk would never attempt. Hong Bay has also about it a surreal and nightmarish quality, as if it exists in a dreamland just on the border of the real world Hong Kong. Adding to that feeling is Marshall’s lyrical narrative and idiosyncratic dialogue, almost as if he is pulling us, not through a novel, but an epic poem in narrative form. Yet another great tale from this sadly departed master of the genre.

[Sandi · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of my favorite police procedural series, set in Hong Kong a few years before the Chinese takeover.