Murder, he wrote

How does a professor go about sketching the lead character of his crime thrillers?

Law and literature, two very different streams seem to converge in He Jiahong's writings. The 62-year-old is a well-known law professor at Renmin University of China, where he teaches criminal law at arguably the country's finest law school, with his focus on evidence and investigation.

He has also written a series of crime thrillers in Chinese. Set in 1990s China, the series' protagonist is a lawyer, who solves some really strange cases like a detective.

The second installment of the series, Black Holes, was published in English last year by Penguin Books, following the first installment Hanging Devils (in English) printed in 2012.

"I studied the law, but I love literature," He says. "So when I started writing the series, I tried to combine them."

Born in 1953, his first manuscript was a 200,000-word novel that originated from his experiences of working on a rural farm in Northeast China's Heilongjiang province during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), but it never got published.

In 1977, he came to Beijing and became a plumber, while secretly dreaming of becoming a novelist. He then met his future wife, whose family wouldn't agree to their marriage unless he got into college. Even though love made him put literature aside for a while, it was worth it. He passed the college entrance exam in 1979 and joined Renmin University of China as a law student.

He devoted himself to legal studies as China begun to re-establish its system of laws as a pressing need in the years following the "cultural revolution".

In 1994, he started to write his crime series, a year after his return from the United States with a doctoral degree from Northwestern University. "It seemed to me that my legal studies had been somewhat achieved, so I wanted to take some time off to realize my dream of becoming an author," He says.

In 1994, one of his college friends suggested that he write crime novels. "And so I did," recalls He. Between 1994 and 1998, he wrote short crime stories for newspapers and published four novels - The Mad Woman (English title Hanging Devil), Evils in the Stock Market (English title Black Holes), Enigma of the Dragon Eye Stone, The Mysterious Ancient Painting, and later added another one titled Black Bat and White Bat.

Besides English, the series has been translated into French, Spanish and Italian, and received wide acclaim overseas. The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom named Hanging Devil as one of the top 10 Asian crime fictions in 2007.

The series' lead character, lawyer Hong Jun, has a lot of similarities with He. Hong, for instance, also has returned from the US, thinks up abstract situations and likes to give lengthy lectures to his assistant.

Hong is depicted as a smart and upright lawyer who doesn't smoke or drink, traits that He says, are of an "ideal lawyer".

"I wanted to create an example of an almost perfect lawyer for China at the time," he says, adding that in order to promote legal reforms in the country, "more good lawyers" are needed.

Many of the ideas of his stories come from real cases that he was involved with either as a lawyer or a police investigator in the 1980s.

A misjudged case in the 1980s in Heilongjiang province that got corrected in 1994 inspired his first novel Hanging Devils, and in the original Chinese version, an appendix containing the details of the actual case - photos of the crime scene, murder weapon and police interrogation records - were attached.

In the second book of his series, Black Holes, the author writes about a revenge plot rooted in the "cultural revolution" and covered in the guise of a stock market fraud in the '90s, when China's stock exchanges were emerging.

The author's personal experiences also inspire him to vividly represent the historical background in his fictional accounts. The setting of a small farm in the freezing northeastern area in his first novel, and the chapters of flashback to Hong's life as a student in the US in the second one, are drawn from his own experience.

From He's point of view, the '90s were a critical phase that linked China's past to its present.

"The changes in Chinese society began in 1990s. Take the stock market, for example - the wealth gained overnight through speculation greatly influenced Chinese people's mindsets, and had a big impact on human nature.

"Although many young people nowadays don't care about the past, I think the past should be remembered as the nation's memory, including the 'cultural revolution'," he says.

He hopes his works will provide future generations with a reference of the age when dramatic changes took place in China.

Contact the writer at xingyi@chinadaily.com.cn

xingyi@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 03/27/2015 page28)