Christopher West - Author

This book was written, and takes place, in the run-up to the handover of Hong Kong to China, back in 1997. This was a fascinating and unique opportunity to observe and write about the clash of three very different cultures - old colonial Britain, dynamic entrepreneurial Hong Kong, and mainland China (the least culturally clear of the three, still finding its way out of the chasm of Communism, but the player with all the top cards).

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…