Ex police officer turn crime writer Rozlan Mohd Noor. To spice things up, Rozlan Mohd Noor has given many of these characters names of identifiable people in Malaysia’s arts and literary scene. The reality of official investigative processes is usually quite unexciting and mostly consists of sending evidence to different departments and waiting for results. Still, Soulless is not without a few issues. Despite the obstacles, Mislan arrives at some form of closure – if not necessarily justice – due to his sheer determination in seeing justice met. In Soulless, Mislan’s greatest obstacle is not really the case’s complexity but the fact that the victim is faceless in more ways than one – undocumented and unidentifiable, her case has every likelihood of getting lost in a sea of greater crimes that have yet to be resolved (the alleged murder of Kevin Moraes, the missing billions from 1MDB and the death camp at Wang Kelian are all alluded in the novel). What sets him apart as a hero is his unwavering determination to see justice met despite seemingly insurmountable odds. He does not have psychic powers or superhuman brilliance. While he shares the traits of the stereotypical cynical and world-weary gumshoe detective – divorced, slightly estranged from his son and in this novel, estranged from his neglected lover – he is for the most part a regular Malaysian everyman. In fact, the ordinariness of Inspector Mislan is what makes him unique as a hero. It is as though Rozlan Mohd Noor were reminding the readers of the extremely dangerous nature of police work and the fact that police officers are very often ordinary men and women doing their jobs.
#Quite soulless tv
These exchanges remind the reader that the world of Inspector Mislan does not belong to the fantastical world of TV crime dramas but the sweaty and humid streets of KL.Īs in any investigative procedure, police officers do not experience cases in isolation: while working on the murder of the faceless girl, Mislan learns that a colleague gets killed in a shootout between a gang of robbers and the police. Morning briefings are nicknamed by the police force as ‘morning prayers’, Mislan has his staple of nasi lemak and kopi o for breakfast, and while waiting for results the police officers banter and joke with one another, often coming up with (and poking fun at) outlandish theories explaining their cases. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in Malaysian police stations will find the world described in Soulless very familiar – the gritty environment of the cramped police stations, the squalor of Kuala Lumpur’s city streets existing simultaneously with markers of wealth, and the long, lulling hours we associate with the police investigation process come alive in Rozlan Mohd Noor’s writing. Noor would be well experienced to write about.
What makes the Inspector Mislan novels distinctive and noteworthy is the believable and almost true-to-life investigative process that occurs in them – something Rozlan Mohd.
#Quite soulless series
Malaysia is home to a very small number of investigative mystery novels in English: Barbara Ismail’s Kain Songket Mysteries revolve the Kelantanese community, Chuah Guat Eng’s Echoes of Silence is a literary novel that makes use of the investigative thriller trope, while across the Causeway Malaysian author Shamini Flint has written a very popular series of mysteries featuring Singaporean investigator Inspector Singh. Thus begins a lengthy and exhaustive investigation to uncover the truth surrounding the death of an individual who is faceless in both the literal and figurative sense of the word: with no friends or relatives claiming acquaintance and no identification documents, Mislan and his colleagues will need to trace her identity based on a single clue – an earring found in her body during the autopsy – and seek justice against insurmountable odds. The novel begins with a scene of destitution and despair: a drug addict named Aden Kho, living in the squalor of downtown KL, encounters the rotting corpse of a mutilated murder victim – she has no face. There is a sense of bleakness that permeates Soulless: Inspector Mislan and the Faceless Girl, the latest of the Inspector Mislan novels, a bilingual series of whodunits written by retired Malaysian policeman Rozlan Mohd.