James Nicoll Reviews

2021’s The Cannonball Tree Mystery is the fifth installment in Ovidia Yu’s Crown Colony mystery series.

1944: The triumphant Japanese Empire has crushed all opposition. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere will surely be eternal. Alarming military setbacks are impossible.

Or so Singapore’s Japanese occupiers would assert. Despite best efforts to censor news, rumors persist that the Pacific War is not going well for Japan. The occupiers focus on local affairs and ignore wider developments.

Series protagonist Su Lin is still processing the revelation that she is half-Japanese. While this means she has a ready-made ally in newly discovered cousin Hideki Tagawa¹, Hideki is not widely popular with his fellow occupiers. Also, the Japanese are more inclined to worry about Su Lin’s Chinese affiliations than her Japanese connection. Su Lin still has to step carefully lest she be shot out of hand by an unduly cautious occupier.

Su Lin’s current occupation is propagandist. More formally, she is assistant editor of the English-language Syonan² Weekly, which is to say Su Lin does the work, while her boss Joben Kobata takes the credit. This job provides Su Lin with two paths to disaster: she might disappoint her employers, in which case a shallow grave on some isolated beach could be in her future. Or she might offend freedom fighters, who can express disapproval in the form of bullets. A third danger lurks: Su Lin is engaging (very secretly) in the resistance. For the moment, Su Lin is alive, which is all that can be realistically hoped.

Mimi Hoshi is Su Lin’s uncle’s sister-in-law and among Su Lin’s least favorite relatives. Su Lin is not thrilled to be approached at work by Mimi, nor is Su Lin amused by Mimi’s tepid attempt at blackmail. Mimi’s attempt to gain an audience with Su Lin’s boss Joben comes to nothing. Su Lin is uncooperative and Joben’s wife Ima orders Mimi to leave.

The next time Su Lin encounters Mimi, Mimi is quite dead. Mimi’s head has been crushed. The culprit seems obvious. There is a cannonball tree nearby. Cannonball fruit are heavy and potentially lethal if they fall from a height onto an unwary person’s head. Mimi would seem to be such an unwary person.

Su Lin suspects, with reason, that Mimi’s death had nothing to do with the heavy fruit. It was merely a convenient means for a killer to present Mimi’s death as an accident.

Su Lin has solved murders before. Determining who killed Mimi and why is within her skillset. However, Singapore under Japan is a dangerous place to uncover truths that highly placed people might find embarrassing.

~oOo~

Su Lin’s long-lost cousin Hideki has a cunning idea to keep Su Lin safe, which is to send her to the family estates in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It may be for the best that this plan does not see fruition.

It seems a bit odd to plant cannonball trees where people might walk. But I suppose that a cannonball-tree fruit is no more lethal than a well-aimed coconut. (It’s all for the best that Newton wasn’t sitting under a cannonball tree. Or a coconut tree.)

Canny readers familiar with the series might have noticed a trend: the culprits tend to be colonists, Western or Japanese. It’s not that the Singaporean author is prejudiced against all colonists (one of the main characters in the series is an admirable Brit). As Yu points out in this book, people who are comfortable tend to stay home. Colonies attract the desperate, the ambitious, and the incompetent. Among colonial administrators, the last two categories often overlap³.

One reason I like this series: the little asides that send me off to the encyclopedias. The existence of cannonball trees did that. So did a passing reference to Peveril Wodehouse, brother to P. G. Wodehouse, who was previously unknown to this reviewer.

Canny readers might check to see if this is the final volume and conclude, on the strength of there being three more books after this one, that Su Lin survives. Perhaps she does! However, none of the people for whom Su Lin feels affection enjoy any such plot immunity⁴, nor can Su Lin know that sequels await. Her situation is perilous and her worries well founded.

As desperate as circumstances are, the novel isn’t bleak. Readers should enjoy this installment in the ongoing series. My only concern is what to read once I’ve caught up with the most recent Su Lin mystery⁵.

The Cannonball Tree Mystery is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Su Lin is the daughter of Hideki Tagawa’s cousin. She is likely a first cousin once removed.

2: The Japanese re-named Singapore Syonan for the duration of the occupation.

3: See also the British quip ​“failed in London, try Hong Kong.”

4: A former colleague spends the book missing, likely dead. Their status is not resolved in this volume.

5: Or rather, where to start with Yu’s vast backlist.