If you think that mysteries don’t touch us where we live, then you aren’t reading the right novels.

Take The Shanghai Moon by S.J. Rozan, who is the focus of Mystery Scene’s February cover story written by me. A Lydia Chin-Bill Smith novel, The Shanghai Moon revolves around the historical fact that about 20,000 Jewish refugees fled to China beginning in the mid 1930s to escape the horrors of Nazi Germany.

The weekend I interviewed S.J., I was in New York for a family event with my husband’s relatives. Naturally, many of us discussed books, specifically mysteries. My husband’s family is Jewish – with varying degrees of religious devotion – so I asked about 40 in-laws if they had ever heard of this historical fact.

A few had.

Most hadn’t.

Even a few who considered themselves well versed about the Holocaust and Jewish history hadn’t heard about this little known footnote.

Those who hadn’t heard kept saying “How did I not know that?”  – a phrase that Lydia Chin also says a couple of times during The Shanghai Moon.

Another refrain I kept hearing was “I’ve got to read that novel.” To which I said, “Good. It’s on sale in February.”
My relatives may not have heard about Jewish refugees making their way to China, but others have. My best friend recently spent a week with us because there is no place like Florida during the winter. Toni, who owns her own public relations firm in Chicago, was raised Catholic like me. So when I mentioned The Shanghai Moon’s plot to her, I was surprised at her answer.

Not only did she know that China became a WWII refuge for Jews, but she had a personal connection: Another friend’s mother and grandmother were part of that wave of refugees to escape the Nazis. They lived for several years in Shanghai before emigrating to the United States. Toni’s friend grew up with stories about their life in China, the make-shift synagogue that the Jewish refugees formed and life in the Shanghai ghetto.

That’s why I maintain that it’s not the action-packed scenes that draw us to mysteries but the personal connection that make us think about who we are, where we’ve been and, yes, where we are going in life.

Have any of you had a similar experience with a mystery novel?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Bill Smith & Lydia Chin, Oline Cogdill, SJ Rozan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.