THE WOMAN IN THE CAMPHOR TRUNK

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Fiction

Not your typical wealthy young socialite ...

THE WOMAN IN THE CAMPHOR TRUNK
An Anna Blanc Mystery
By Jennifer Kincheloe
304 pp. Seventh Street Books

Reviewed by Eric Petersen

Mystery writer Jennifer Kincheloe is back with the second entry in her new series set in an unusual time and place (Los Angeles circa 1908) and featuring the most unlikely and endearing sleuth since Miss Marple. The first entry, The Secret Life of Anna Blanc, is also reviewed on this site.

Anna Blanc wasn’t your typical wealthy young socialite. Fiercely independent, tough, intelligent, and determined, her dream was to put her formidable deductive skills to work by becoming a police detective. Unfortunately, at that time, women weren’t allowed to become beat cops, let alone detectives.

Taking the only job available to a woman in the Los Angeles Police Department, Anna became a police matron – a job that involves handling women who’ve been arrested, handling juvenile delinquents, and taking away children from women who can longer care for them.

In her first adventure, Anna shocked the city and established herself as the department’s best unofficial detective by bringing a sadistic serial killer of prostitutes to justice. Now she faces another murder case that hits close to home.

The Woman in the Camphor Trunk opens in Chinatown, where Anna’s ex-boyfriend and true love, young police detective Joe Singer, has been given the beat. Joe had asked her to marry him, but she panicked and dumped him, fearing that marriage would mean the end of her independence and the end of her police career. Though Joe is now dating another girl, he and Anna still have strong feelings for each other.

The story begins with Anna stealing the severed head of a Chinese man from a crime scene, mistaking the victim for her father’s kindhearted cook, Mr. Yau. Joe Singer recognizes the head as belonging to Ko Chung, a highbinder (henchman) for the Hop Sing tong (criminal gang) likely killed by the rival Bing Kong tong.

The Hop Sing and Bing Kong tongs have been vying for control of Chinatown, and now that the Bing Kong have killed Ko Chung for stealing two of their singsong girls, (young teenage slave girls purchased in China and brought to America to work as prostitutes) the police fear that a full-scale tong war will soon break out.

That’s the least of Anna and Joe’s troubles. When Joe accompanies Anna on an assignment to interview potential witnesses in another tong related killing, one of them, a man named Leo Lim, appears to be dead in his own bed, and a horrible smell is coming from a trunk in his bedroom.

Inside the trunk is the moldering corpse of a white woman. In the bed is not the body of a dead man, but pillows and a braid of hair arranged to look like a body. Leo Lim is nowhere to be found, and the two detectives are left with a potential nightmare in the making.

If the public learns that a white woman was found murdered in a Chinese man’s apartment, the city will explode, and many innocent Chinese will be lynched by bloodthirsty white racists. To add to Anna’s horror, she recognizes the victim’s necklace. The dead woman is a young missionary named Elizabeth Bonsor.

Elizabeth and Anna had been close friends once, but then Anna’s father Christopher Blanc a fiercely controlling, wealthy Frenchman, ruined Elizabeth’s family. Feeling indebted to the Bonsors, Anna determines to solve Elizabeth’s murder and bring her killer to justice.

As she and Joe begin their investigation, their only allies are their superior officer Detective Wolf and a mysterious Chinese man who calls himself Mr. Jones. He speaks fluent English and is connected to the Chinatown underworld, but is also known for helping poor Chinese survive in Los Angeles and protecting them from white racist persecution.

While they search for Leo Lim, who is initially their prime suspect in the murder of Elizabeth Bonsor, Anna and Joe discover that Elizabeth and Leo were in love, but the miscegenation laws prevented them from marrying, so Elizabeth chose to live with him in sin. When her father found out, he disowned her.

Anna knows what it’s like to be disowned. Her father disowned her when he found out that she’d become a police matron. Now she lives in a small, grimy apartment, subsists on a starvation diet of Cracker Jacks and kippers, and has to pawn what few baubles she has left to survive.

As the investigation continues, Anna uncovers proof that Elizabeth Bonsor had another Chinese boyfriend – a man named Chan Mon whom nobody in Chinatown has ever heard of. A man who may be her real killer. 

The Woman in the Camphor Trunk is another rollicking mystery featuring Jennifer Kincheloe’s endearing sleuth, Anna Blanc. Like the previous entry, it succeeds thanks to the author’s meticulous attention to period detail and her unforgettable characters. Highly recommended!


Eric Petersen is an administrator and blogmaster for the Internet Writing Workshop, an international, online writer’s group run out of Penn State University. You can reach him by e-mail at EricPetersen1970@hotmail.com
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