A Deadly Secret

Written in 1963 and first serialized under the title The Sword of the Plain Maiden in Hong Kong's Ming Pao and in the Southeast Asia Weekly published by Singapore's Nanyang Siang Pau, A Deadly Secret is the coldest in style and the closest to realism among Jin Yong's fifteen martial arts novels. The story begins when Di Yun, a country youth from western Hunan, accompanies his master Qi Changfa and his junior fellow disciple Qi Fang to the city to congratulate his master's senior fellow disciple Wan Zhenshan on his birthday: at a birthday banquet, long-smoldering suspicions among the master's circle erupt over a "Linked-City Swordplay" that conceals the secret of Emperor Yuan of Liang's treasure. Di Yun is framed by his master's senior fellow disciple's family, falsely accused of being a rapist, thrown into a death cell, and has his shoulder blades pierced; the "madman" Ding Dian in that cell is in fact a remarkable man who holds the secret of the Linked-City Formula and is trapped by love. Thereafter Di Yun masters the Divine Illumination Skill in desperate straits, lives through the strife among the various factions of the martial world over the treasure, witnesses with his own eyes the covenant beneath the chrysanthemums by which his sworn brother Ding Dian and Ling Shuanghua keep faith with each other in life and death, and with his own ears and hands comes to know the true face of his master's uncles and seniors killing one another for wealth. In plain, spare prose and with a dense gallery of villains, the novel writes to the utmost how greed turns men into beasts, while preserving a thread of warm hope in the loyalty and kindness of Ding Dian, Ling Shuanghua, Qi Fang, Shui Sheng, and others. The book has twelve chapters in all and runs to about 240,000 characters.