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Lê Phong. Lê Phong was created by the Vietnamese author Thê Lu and appeared in Lê Phong Phóng Viên (1937) and Mai Huong và Lê Phong (1937).

Lê Phong is a Great Detective known as the "Vietnamese Sherlock Holmes.” Lê is a consulting detective who is active in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Lê combines the deductive acumen of Holmes with the trappings (but not the attitude) of the hard-boiled private detectives. Lê is a patriot who works hard to make his world a better place. Among the enemies he deals with is his version of Irene Adler, Henriette Mai Hu'o'ng, a Vietnamese women who became a French citizen. She is an adventuress and the leader of a band of assassins, and becomes Lê’s Loving Enemy.

* I'm including the Lê Phong novels in the Best of the Encyclopedia category because of their historical importance. The two novels weren't the first Vietnamese detective or mystery novels but they were the first important ones, and provided models for the Vietnamese detective and mystery stories and novels which followed them. Author Thê Lu was a fan of Sherlock Holmes and made Lê Phong into a genuinely Vietnamese Great Detective, one that was informed and shaped by Vietnamese history, politics, and culture as well as by hardboiled detective fiction. Moreover, Thê Lu added Henriette Mai Hu'o'ng to the second novel, and she was only one of the most beguiling of the Great Detectives' Loving Enemies. 

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