At Flyleaf Books sometime in the last six months or so, I happened across a copy of Bad Kids, a 2014 murder-suspense novel by Zijin Chen. Certainly one couldn't call it a mystery novel because all the murders happen in the presence of the reader (OK, all but one, but the killer admits to it to another character without a ton of pressure). The suspense in the novel derives entirely from the question of what will happen to the characters, will they be made to pay for their actions? In the end, the answer is... we/re not told.
Crime and Punishment this is not. There are two interlocking murder plots that are brought together, with a slight borrowing from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. Three kids (a boy and a girl who escaped from an orphanage, the third an academic superstar) capture video of a guy killing his in-laws. They blackmail him. A little bit later, they quasi-accidentally kill the half-sister of the genius kid, pushing her out a window to her death when they had really only intended to ram her head into a shit-filled toilet because she was such a brat.
Two things about the novel strike the reader. First, there's pretty much zero fluff or connective tissue. The novel consists of short, architectonic chapters that build the plot and do very little else. Atmospheric description of surroundings, food, people etc. is conspicuously absent. This is striking because, so often in the West where the mystery novel is a long-established genre, the mystery plot really serves first and foremost to let a narrator range across a society and render judgments, show scenery, describe characters. This is nowhere more in evidence than in things like Masterpiece Mystery or Britbox where the mystery lets a camera roam across a lush verdant landscape.
All of that shit is out the window in Bad Kids. This is a novel about morals. Kind of. Because what we would think of as morals also aren't very much in evidence. As the titular bad kids discuss the consequences of their actions, what they're concerned with is will they get in trouble. And they agree that, because they're not yet 14, even if they get in trouble it won't be too bad because they can't be sent to real prison, just kids' prison. Makes sense to me. So yeah, they go ahead and kill some more people, specifically the genius kid's dad and his second wife, referred to consistently as Big Bitch because she was indeed really mean to him.
There's also a tender subplot about a budding romance between the genious kid and the girl escapee. So cute. Until she dies at the end in circumstances that seem to have been anticipated and manipulated by the genius kid.
And so, the big question remains: will the genius kid, who could probably ace the all-important gaokao exam and go on to a really good job in the government or a big firm, be forced to give up his promising career because he commits and orchestrates some murders? The answer is not given.
Bad Kids became huge hit when adapted for TV in 2020, with more than a billion messages on Weibo discussing it.
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