Of course, my own writings fall way short of the Count’s standards – it’s great to be reminded again of just how good and how big a novel should be (‘big’ in a spiritual sense, not just in sheer size).  It is good to have things to aspire to, even if you know you’ll never get to that level.

I find this mid-19th century novel much more informative about life than most modern works.  There is, of course, the odd area where times have changed so much as to make the author’s views puzzling.  For example, Tolstoy always seems to speak disparagingly of sex, which to the modern reader seems cold, unrealistic and prudish.  (But even here, it’s fascinating to fly back 150 years and see how people saw things differently.)

In other areas, I feel a real sense of re-discovery.  The human quest for God is something modern novelists seem embarrassed about describing.  If a character is religious, they are usually a bit barmy.  But this is not true in life.  People obsessed with religion can be strange – or dangerous, if they decide their God wants them to kill other people.  But many of the rest of us are involved in this quest, in our own quiet, private ways.  I’m happy to write about it in The Enlightenment Club, even if modernists will scoff.

I guess War and Peace is essentially a man’s book – the dominance of the three great male characters, all those battles (those of us lucky not to have been in a war know how fortunate we are: that could be us).  But it is no ‘masculinist’ propaganda: male weaknesses are dissected with painful insight.  Intelligent women, I’m sure, read this book and love it.

Anyway, I’m about half way through – Prince Andriy has just proposed to Natasha.  I’ll probably comment on it again in another blog, as this great novel is a lot more interesting than my own rather mundane life.  I feel a real privilege and excitement every time I pick it up and am allowed into the innermost souls of these characters.

Of course, she rebels against this.  But does she go too far?  Was the ‘learning’ in the Club true wisdom, or just clever words and intellectual snobbery?

This is a book about ‘high culture’, and its somewhat uneasy relationship with popular culture and, more generally, with everyday life.

It is also a book about therapy.  Right now, that ought to guarantee blockbuster status - but Stella hasn’t had a dreadfully abused childhood (so no opportunities for one of those Dave Pelzer covers), just makes a bit of a mess of her life.  As a lot of us do…  And goes to a therapist to get some sorting out done. And has to face - but I don’t want to give the story away.

I greatly enjoyed writing from the female point of view.  Maybe this is some Jungian thing about animus and anima, or maybe I just found it fun to pretend to be someone else.  In my writing I always seem to end up doing this.  Four books about a Chinese cop, and now, when I get to the UK, I indulge in a spot of literary cross-dressing.  Why?  I have no idea.  It might be some dark stuff about hidden self-loathing, but I think it’s simpler - I’m fascinated by the question ‘What’s it like to be somebody else?’  Reading is, of course, one answer to this, but so is writing.

Finally, though the book has some pretty dark places, it is essentially a comedy.  The humour is gentle and ironic, rather than ’in your face’ - I know, the modern taste is for the latter, but it’s not me. 

There is a misconception that books which are funny are somehow not serious.  I don’t buy this for a minute: it’s very adolescent to equate seriousness with po-facedness or gloom.  The demons are there, of course, but - I’ve said, I don’t want to give the ending away.

I am still completing this novel – David Taylor’s comment above was on the last draft.  Watch this space for news about its publication time and format.

In our global, connected 21^st Century, it can be hard to imagine how remote and strange China felt to a young Brit growing up in the 1960’s. There was the culture, of course: the writing, the names, the food (I remember my parents taking me somewhere very exotic for a special treat, to a ‘Chinese’ restaurant). The politics: if Russia was Communist, China was super-Communist, especially once Mao’s Cultural Revolution had kicked off. The inaccessibility: hardly anybody ever got to go to China, and if they did, they were herded round by grinning minders, unable to experience anything unplanned or unofficial. China was vast, unknown, unknowable and scary. So, of course, fascinating to a gawky, slightly rebellious teenager…

Fast forward a decade and a half, to 1985. China is changing, albeit slowly. Mao has been dead nearly ten years; his replacement Deng Xiaoping has started talking about ‘reform’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘modernizations’; foreign travellers are to be allowed in on their own, for the first time since the Revolution… And meanwhile I’ve fallen in love with backpack travel, having done two journeys round India. (Otherwise, however, my life is hitting a bit of a wall: a PhD is going nowhere; I’m scraping a living as a musician, playing in various dance bands.) Then one of my bands gets a ‘gig’ in Hong Kong. The fabulous enigma that is China will be a commuter-train-ride away.

I cancel all engagements for months after the Hong Kong one. I start learning Mandarin and boning up on Chinese history and philosophy. My life becomes taken over by this upcoming venture. I do not, however, plan a book - just an adventure, to get as close as I can to this strange culture and learn as much as I can from the experience.

The time to leave arrives. We do the ‘gig’; I wave the rest of the band off home from the old Kai Tak airport. Next morning, I’m off to the People’s Republic of China…

This book is the story of that journey.

I wrote it because I experienced so many things on that journey and when I got home wanted to read other books that recalled them for me. But I couldn’t find any. So I gave myself a year to write one of my own.

It took rather more than that. The year ended, and I had a passable manuscript, but not a wonderful one. And I wanted it to be wonderful, because the journey had been wonderful. So I gave myself more time.

A college friend, Clare Kennard, knew a literary agent (I had no such connections), Rivers Scott, and I approached him with the manuscript. He liked it; he sent it to a few publishers; Maureen Waller at Simon and Shuster UK liked it too; I signed my first publishing contract!

The rest is history - real history, where nothing much happens. The book came out (the weekend after it did, I bought all the Sundays, expecting to see reviews). It sold adequately, got some nice comments, went out of print… Later, when I became a more successful crime author, I persuaded my publishers to reissue it in paperback, and bless them, they did and it’s still in print. Number 1,300,000 on amazon’s bestseller list when I last looked, and that’s partially because I occasionally buy the odd copy for myself.

Still, I think it’s a good read. It’s of real historical interest. 1986 was the time of China’s great change: tiny shoots of enterprise were beginning to peep through the cracks in the Communist concrete - shoots which are now massive forests. Journey… presents a unique view of this era. Other China travel books from this time are suffused in misery, while I found a lot of energy, resilience and optimism in the people I met (as well as some truly terrible stories of suffering). History seems to have borne my view out.

I guess Journey… is also a ‘rite-of-passage’ book. I think a lot of people found, and still find, filling a rucksack and discovering the world a life-changing experience. I’ve not read too many books that honour this experience (if you know of any, please email me and tell me.) Journey to the Middle Kingdom does this, and I’m proud of the fact.

I said ‘clash’, but the cultures did manage to work together - just. The mainlanders thought the Hong Kongers vulgar, and distrusted the British: old indignities die hard (‘No dogs or Chinese allowed’ - sign in park in 1930’s Shanghai). The Hong Kongers seemed to tolerate the Brits, and reciprocated the mainlanders’ contempt, seeing them as slow-witted and unadventurous (older Hong Kongers, refugees from Communism, still felt a residual fear of their new masters-to-be). The Brits? The ones I met, officers in the Royal Hong Kong Police, seemed a very decent bunch, who had a real respect for Chinese people and culture, though they clearly felt that an era was coming to an end, and that the new era would not match it. The force had had a reputation for corruption and racism in the past, but I did not see any evidence of this.

I encountered very little paranoia anywhere, of the kind that was being written up by some commentators back home, who issued dire warnings of a crackdown, a ‘new Tiananmen’ etc. etc. the moment the Union Jack was lowered. ‘What will happen after 1997?’ a waitress in a Kowloon bar said to me with a shrug, ‘Why, 1998 of course.’

This was a marvellous book to research. It meant a trip to Hong Kong, a place where my love affair with China began, and which was as magical as ever - maybe even more magical, as since my previous visit I M Pei’s fabulous Bank of China building had appeared on the island waterfront. Looking up at that waterfront, crossing from Kowloon on the Star Ferry - surely the greatest value ride in the world - I knew exactly how to start the novel. A body is found floating in the malodorous waters of the ‘Fragrant Harbour’, its hands and feet bound. It turns out to be a senior member of the mainland government-in-waiting…

There was a wide range of potential reasons for his death. Pure politics? The mushrooming trade in pirate CDs, a huge proportion of which came at that time from South China? A connection with the Triads, still powerful in Hong Kong? Or something more specific to the official himself, who turns out to have unusual sexual tastes…

Well, I’m not going to say, am I?

As with all the novels, it received positive reviews. James Melville, himself an author of an excellent crime series set in the East (Superintendent Otani, of the Tokyo CID), said some particularly nice things, as did the Literary Review. I got to do some radio interviews, that varied from a thoughtful Radio Norfolk piece to a West Midlands station that just asked me if I could recommend any Chinese restaurants. And by now the series had made it to America, so critics were beginning to take notice over there too. However, there wasn’t exactly a trumpet-blast of publicity. I had hoped that tying the novel in to a topical event would have created some media attention, but it didn’t. Instead, everyone focused on Paul Theroux’ Kowloon Tong and forgot other ‘handover’ books. Well, what the hell - I wanted to write about the handover, anyway: publicity would have been an added bonus.

Looking back at the book, I’m proud of the job I did in describing the interaction of the three cultures, and in bringing the Hong Kong of that strange, unique era to life. The weakness of the story is probably the numerical clues, quite fun, but maybe a bit contrived - fine for an old-school whodunit, but a bit out of place, perhaps, in a novel that aspires to realism as well as puzzlement. Still, that’s genre writing - or any writing for that matter. There’s always an element of artifice in any representation of reality, even great realist classics like Flaubert, George Eliot or Zola. And certainly in crime fiction, it’s a gross oversimplification to say that classic whodunits are pure artifice and ‘mean streets’ writers are totally ‘realistic’. The tough guys are closer to reality, but both types of writing have conventions and make assumptions.

The book concludes with the inspector finding a new calmness inside himself, even when cycling round Tiananmen Square, the site of the massacre that he witnessed and about which he still has such mixed feelings. A decision he has taken in this story gives him a new connection to his true values and interests. Perhaps that was the note on which to end the series - a trilogy. But another big event was looming on the horizon: a century that had seen great suffering in China was shortly to end; a new one, full of promise for the booming Middle Kingdom was about to begin. I could not resist setting a fourth Anzhuang / Rosina novel against this background…

The Chinese conception of the countryside is very different from our western European one. We rather hanker after it, and people like my wife and I choose to live in it. Most Chinese I meet think this is totally barmy. Who’d live in the sticks, when you could live in a city? Deng Xiaoping, the ‘paramount leader’ from 1978 to 1992 came from a small Sichuan village - and never went back there. Can one imagine a Western politician not milking their ‘roots’ in the same way? So, in a sense, Wang’s hankering to revisit rural Shandong Province is untypical. But he is not a successful operator in Beijing (he’s an excellent cop, but that’s not the same thing) and a traditionalist at heart, so I knew it was what he would have wanted to do. Even if the location might not have had the allure of a Cotswold village, his family ties and loyalty would have compelled him.

Rosina, of course, is rather less keen… I wanted the inspector to settle down with the nurse he had hooked up with at the end of Blue Lantern - so he did (such is the power of authorship. If only real life were that way…) I’d come to feel that the ‘divorced cop’ was a bit of a cliché. I also really enjoyed writing the character of Rosina Lin, as a contrast to Wang: she is a city woman, modern and independently minded (I’d say ‘feisty’, but the word has become as much a cliché as the divorced cop). She loves him for his kindness and for his depth and strength of character, but the couple are in many ways different.

A key theme of Black Dragon River is the Cultural Revolution and its after-effects. The Cultural Revolution (1966 - 76) was one of the most bizarre and horrific events of post-war history, when Mao tried to destroy all vestiges of traditional Chinese culture and replace it with a grotesque cult of his own power-bloated personality and tinpot philosophy. (There’s a very thorough Wikipedia entry if you want to know more about this event.) Young people were especially manipulated to do cruel deeds and, in the worst cases, to betray their parents and family (particularly heinous in China). What had become of these youngsters now, I wondered?

I have Chinese friends who lived through this era: they just ‘ran with the pack’ and didn’t do wicked things themselves. They suffered through enduring discomfort and receiving lousy education, but have clear consciences. But what of those who got caught up in the enthusiasm and committed acts they now, as adults, know to have been monstrous? I found that question fascinating, and gave Wang a brother, still living back in the home village, whose life had been ruined by such recriminations.

At the same time, I also wanted to look forward. ‘To grow rich is honourable,’ Deng Xiaoping had said in 1985 (no doubt, to the sound of the Great Helmsman rotating in his grave). Entrepreneurs were flourishing, even in rural areas. Sometimes they were creating power for themselves as well as money. How, exactly, would this change a rural community - and would these people always use power wisely?

The novel begins with Wang and Rosina travelling to Shandong. They are at first feted by the local dignitaries in a surreal (but not atypical) banquet. But then they are suddenly accused of meddling in local politics and ordered to leave. And then the local Party Secretary is found bludgeoned to death with a bust of Karl Marx… The inspector soon finds himself caught up in the investigation - and having to face facts about his own family that he would rather not know.

Black Dragon River got good reviews, especially in the prestigious ‘Literary Review’. I also got a profile in the Eastern Daily Press (a photographer came along and took some shots: later I got a phone call saying could I do the shoot again, as he’d forgotten to put any film in his camera…)

Any regrets about the book, looking back? No, not really. The title was a bit of a compromise. I wanted to call it The Hunger of Ghosts, as it is about the haunting effects of the past, and because ghosts in Chinese mythology are unpleasant creatures, usually hungry for revenge. But I was persuaded otherwise, and kept the Death / colour / something- iconically-Chinese format.

But otherwise, of the four Wang / Rosina novels, this is my favourite. It isn’t just a mystery, but a novel about violence, its political abuse, its lasting effects on both perpetrators and victims. It’s also about how to step out of the shadow of violence and reclaim humanity and dignity.

The story begins in the mid-nineteenth century… Hong Xiuquan was a clever but highly-strung young man from a poor background, bright enough to enter the all-important exams for the Imperial Civil Service, but not bright enough - or not polished enough - to pass. In despair at his failure, he fell into a depression, which was lifted when he was handed a leaflet by a Christian missionary. Hong went to sleep that night and slept soundly for the first time in ages - and dreamt that the Christian God was calling him to be Jesus’ brother, and to convert and redeem China from its Manchurian overlords.

Hong gathered groups of fanatics around him, clashed with the authorities, became an outlaw, started a guerrilla war… Like Mao Zedong three generations later, he proved himself a natural military leader, and soon his ragtag army was raging across South China, armed with old muskets, looted cannons, knives on sticks - anything his believers could get their hands on. It doesn’t say much for the Chinese emperor or his Western allies that Hong soon conquered half the country, and for a number of years ruled as an alternative emperor in Nanjing. In the end, he became more and more eccentric; his rule collapsed and the reprisals were, of course, brutal. It is estimated that 20,000,000 people lost their lives in the course of the rebellion, in the fighting and in the chaos that it created.

This story had to be told (and has been, in Jonathan Spence’s excellent ‘God’s Chinese Son’). But how about updating it? Not in precise detail, of course, but imagine a new cult springing up in modern China, with a head who sees himself as another Hong Xiuquan…

You may notice a parallel with the Falun Gong or Falun Dafa, a grass-roots spiritual organization that has grown in China (and, since 1999 been persecuted by the authorities there). However when I wrote the book, I had no knowledge of the organization. Actually, people said to me that such an outfit was unlikely to develop in China…

I am interested in the whole business of cults (I don’t want to get involved in the argument about whether Falun Gong is a cult or just a set of spiritual practices: the outfit in my book is definitely a cult). Why do people join them, and what happens to them when they do? Cults also make great material for crime stories. A cult HQ is often remote and closed, like the traditional Agatha Christie country house. At the same time, however, such an organization would be set firmly in the modern world, with political overtones (in China, it would not develop unwatched: so who is watching, and why do they allow an apparently anti-Communist organization to continue?)

The novel is set against the upcoming millennium - itself a magnet for cults: how, exactly, does the cult leader plan to usher in the new era?

To research it, I returned to Beijing - and had a serious attack of culture shock. People had told me how much it had changed, but I was not expecting the Hong Kong shopping malls, the new-look Wangfujing - and the terrible clogging of its once majestic boulevards with cars. Such is progress, and one must welcome it, as it means better lives for most people, materially and, one must hope in the long term, politically. But it is not without costs.

The story begins in the centre of this new Beijing, where ‘Julie’ Lin is sitting eating one of Colonel Sanders’ chickens. Julie is what a Chinese friend of mine called a ‘Chuppie’, China’s answer to the ‘yuppies’. Or rather, she is a satellite orbiting round the yuppie culture: she herself is not a dynamic young professional, but simply an attendant to such people. So maybe it is not surprising that she is unhappy with her life, and is looking for something more than just money, parties and transitory love affairs. Her family - of which Rosina Lin is a part - don’t understand her, or really like her any longer. Then she meets a young man on the street, with a strange and compelling new message…

This was the final novel in the quartet. I hugely enjoyed writing it, and it was well published, in the UK and America. My agent wanted more… But I felt this was a good place to stop. So many series lose quality, become more far-fetched or, worse, repetitive. I like the old showbiz adage ‘quit while you’re winning’. So I did.

After travelling in China and writing about those travels (Journey to the Middle Kingdom), I wanted to write more about the world’s largest, and (to me) most fascinating, nation. But how, exactly? My inspiration came from the movie Gorky Park. There were so many things I loved about this film. Like good travel writing, it really got inside another culture. The screenplay was, of course, marvellous: edgy, insightful, devoid of flab - Dennis Potter was a genius. And above all, there was the character of Arkady Renko. I was fascinated by his combination of loyalty to the Soviet system and his individuality. The film (more than the book, though that is excellent, too) avoided the trap of the ‘maverick cop against the system’ cliché. Renko is a bit of a maverick, but he is ultimately loyal to his country and system. This struck me as real and human. A Soviet cop would be a Soviet citizen, with all the good and bad things that implied. A Chinese cop would be part of the system too - but a sensitive, intelligent man in that position would also be thoughtful, aware and maybe a little troubled …

And so began that wonderful process by which fictional characters emerge from the simple black-and-white of the outline and slowly grow into real, complex human beings… Anyone who writes will know the joy and the strangeness of this process: how, as you work on them, characters come to life. They acquire minds and wills of their own. ‘No, the inspector wouldn’t do that,’ I find myself thinking as I try to squeeze him in a situation required by the plot (in the end, the plot has to change…)

Actually, the first thing I wrote was a short story, about 40 pages, about the theft and illegal sales of cultural treasures. The plot was very simple - not much mystery; what I enjoyed was creating the characters around the inspector: his odious boss, the thuggish underling, his streetwise friend in the information department. By the time I’d finished this, I knew I had to write a full-length novel about these people.

Death of a Blue Lantern begins at the Beijing opera, a traditional art form that I knew the inspector would enjoy. A body is found at the theatre; subsequent investigations lead to gangland connections (a ‘Blue Lantern’ is a junior member of a triad). But is there corruption within the police as well? At the same time, the inspector comes under official scrutiny for his lack of enthusiasm for Party policy around and after the Tiananmen Square massacre…

The book is set in the very early 1990’s, and the shadow of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre hangs over it. The Party was keen to silence any dissent. There was an official line, that the ‘political turmoil’ was caused by troublemakers who had to be stopped. Anyone who disagreed with this line was in trouble. Wang is not a western liberal, and would be well aware of the dangers of anarchy (he would have seen China plunged into anarchy at the end of the 1967 - 76 ‘Cultural Revolution’, and would have a Shakespearean fear of it). He is a Communist Party member, from conviction, not convenience. But he is also a sensitive and patriotic man, who saw the People’s Liberation Army (a concept in which he believes wholeheartedly) firing on the People. He does not have easy answers to the difficulties this causes him.

I worked on the book’s structure for what seemed like ages - the plot was mapped out on pieces of A4 stuck together, lengthways, with sellotape. (Sadly, I think I’ve thrown these away - I’d love to see them now.)

When this was done, it was time to go back to China… This was one of the great benefits of writing the series - three of the four books necessitated research trips. I set off mainly in search of locations to set scenes in, but actually made contact with the police and learnt much more about how they go about their business. The overriding impression I got was that politics was not central to their lives, which instead were very similar to lives of police officers in the UK - trying to protect the public from the activities of criminals (though one officer complained that he spent more time being called out to domestic disputes than anything else). Clearly, the need to prove a case is far less strong in China, but it is not non-existent - officers have to account to their superiors.

I did not speak to any officer about the Tiananmen massacre: I felt this would be both rude and counter-productive (they would just have ‘shut up shop’, and, given the level of paranoia about the whole business, I wouldn’t blame them).

Armed with this knowledge, I started the actual writing. It took several drafts to get right - sadly I am not a quick writer. I then found a publisher, Harper Collins (actually two publishers were suddenly interested - publishers are like buses; you wait for ages, then two come along at once…)

An attractive hardback came out in 1994. I got an excellent quote from Simon Brett, who had taught me on a particularly good Arvon course with PD James (the course graduates still stay in touch). Marcel Berlins reviewed the book for the Times. Best of all, the book was nominated for ‘Best First Novel’ at the 1994 World Mystery Convention (Bouchercon). Bouchercon is the world’s top convention for crime writing: this is not a ‘Mickey Mouse’ award but a real honour. Sitting at my table at the convention dinner when the list was read out and then the winner announced was a huge thrill - even though the prize actually went to Caleb Carr’s ‘The Alienist’.

The book was also published in America, Japan and Germany. In 1999 it came out in UK paperback. It is now going to be reissued as the world focuses its attention on Beijing for the Olympics.

Blue Lantern is about Beijing in the early 1990’s. Can I still call it a novel of contemporary China? Tiananmen has ceased to be such a defining issue in Chinese life, though it is still a source of unease to the Party. And China has become much wealthier since those days: the face of Beijing has changed radically, for the better in some ways (more prosperity, which has to be good thing) and for the worse in others (destruction of the hutongs, appalling pollution). But behind that face, power is still exercised in the same harsh way as it was in the early ’90s (and always has been). And people like Wang Anzhuang and Rosina Lin still strive to do what is right - by the standards of their culture and traditions, not ours - despite the twin lures of official face-saving and of corruption. This remains the reality of twenty-first century, Olympic China, and I find it fascinating.