Great fun, set in 1920s London! As with Conan Doyle's Holmes and Watson, we have a studious and sensible main narrator Lao She who documents the case and a brilliant opium-addicted detective Dee Ren Jie who borders on comic book superhero, donning a cape and flying along the London rooftops to solve the mystery of a series of murders traceable back to a Chinese tontine. Dee adopts the persona of "Spring-heeled Jack" whom Judith Flanders calls "the first urban legend" from the 1830s and who by the 1870s had evolved into "a Batman-like righter of wrongs"; other allusions to real life abound, with guest appearances by Bertrand Russell and Ezra Pound. It's a lively ride!
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