Free Dreams of Justice by Dick Adler

once-idealistic Casson’s only aim—although he does make a few feeble attempts to help a lover escape to Algeria.
    Then, recruited by a sympathetic cop, Casson joins a group of army officers working undercover inside the Vichy government to help Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement. Casson’s job is to persuade a group of hard-core French communists who have no reason to trust him to risk their lives; to do so he must organize a complicated, dangerous transfer of weapons. There’s nothing glamorous or romantic about the work or its result, and death becomes an everyday occurrence. But Furst is so persuasive a writer that we come to realize just how much a victory it is for Casson to remain alive until the end of the book, when he hears “a light knock at the door.”

7
    Better Red Than Dead
    No books of history or political theory have helped me understand the Communist world better than the mysteries written about it. Fiction, especially mysteries, makes propaganda revelatory and often ironic; characters from countries surrounded by walls of distrust open their hearts in the stories and prove both their common humanity and their unique vision.
    DEATH OF A RED HEROINE, by Qiu Xiaolong (Soho)
    Qiu Xiaolong knows that words can save your soul, and in his pungent, poignant first mystery, “Death of a Red Heroine,” he proves it on every page. Qiu, who was a published poet and translator in Shanghai, came to the U.S. on a Ford Foundation fellowship in 1988— the year before the Tiananmen Square massacre—and decided to stay. That he left a large part of his heart behind is evident in the character of Inspector Chen Cao, a young poet and translator of everyone from Ruth Rendell to T.S. Eliot who also happens to be a Shanghai homicide detective.
    Chen became a cop in a sincere effort to be a useful citizen, and he is seen as a rising star (he even gets his own apartment—a tremendous coup at his age and station). He puts up with the Communist Party’s Byzantine code of behavior, although it still seems in 1990, a year after Tiananmen, to be designed to thwart human aspiration at every turn. As head of the special-case squad,
    Chen has not only a supervisor—a reasonably supportive party official—but also a watcher: a semiretired military man, Commissar Zhang, who on the surface represents the spirit of pre-Tiananmen rigidity and political repression. But then, halfway through the book, in a scene that would bring tears to the eyes of a statue, Zhang has a telephone conversation with his daughter, and we see with blazing clarity the damage done to everyone during the so-called Cultural Revolution.
    The true beauty of “Death of a Red Heroine” is the muscular ease with which Qiu blends history, plenty of poetry and a compelling mystery: the murder of Guan Hongying, a former national role-model worker, a beautiful young woman who slipped from patriotic fame into loneliness and depravity. Hampered by his superiors, Chen and his older, rougher, but no less sympathetic colleague, Detective Yu, try to penetrate a world of privilege, where the children of once-powerful, then-reviled public figures walk both sides of a dangerous line between loyalty and freedom. On the way we get to see, smell, taste and hear an amazingly evocative portrait of a country in love with words. Staying in a special guesthouse for writers in a provincial town, Chen, as a poet, is treated like royalty by a businessman who invites him to dinner, saying: “The rain has ceased. So let us go then, you and I”—invoking the spirit of Eliot and his Prufrock to light up a wasteland of shattered dreams.
    THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS, by Olen Steinhauer (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
    “Emil had joined Homicide in order to deal with the clearest and least ambiguous issue of social conscience: murder,” writes Olen Steinhauer of the hero of his first mystery, 22-year-old Emil Brod. It’s 1948, three years after the Russians liberated Brod’s fictional East