Chinese Killer King: trespassing the boundaries of crime fiction and Cantonese literature

ABSTRACT This essay introduces readers to a Cantonese writer, editor, and director, Yam Wu-Fa/Ren Huhua (?-1976), whose creative life peaked between the 1930s and the 1950s among a Cantonese-speaking readership across the Pacific. Pertinent to our discussion is his crime fiction series, Chinese Killer King (zhongguo sharenwang). The Killer King, “Charlie Chiu”—not to be confused with Earl Derr Biggers’s “Charlie Chan”—is a Cantonese borderland hero who derives from various references, both fictional and historical, addressing a cosmopolitan yet Cantonese imaginary. Overlooked, Yam and his works represent more than the marginalisation that is commonly experienced by Southernly “popular fictions” in a histography under an elitist and Shanghai-Beijing-centric framework. Chinese Killer King challenges the kind of place-bound identity politics evident in today’s discussion on Hong Kong literature and Sinophone writings. The author hence explores the possibility of using “Cantonese literature” as a critical framework to historicise and theorise a Cantonese-ness and its border-crossing dimension and discusses how the series may be positioned among world crime fictions.