LIKE THE PLOTS he crafts in his detective novels, He Jiahong's life story is full of twists and turns. Although he says he dreamed of becoming a writer as a young man, it wasn't until he started practising and teaching law nearly two decades later that he finally achieved his goal.
But the intervening years weren't wasted. His US legal training and first-hand knowledge of evidence and criminal justice procedures sets him apart from many crime writers. His energetic writing is rich in colourful Beijing colloquialisms and his cast of characters taken from all strata of mainland society presents a vivid panorama of modern China.
Fifty-three-year-old He Jiahong began writing detective novels in 1994 while teaching law at Renmin University in Beijing, at a time when jingtan xiaoshuo, or detective fiction, was largely untouched by Chinese writers, who viewed it as frivolous. 'When my colleagues found out about my writing, they reacted with shock and disbelief,' He Jiahong says in his roomy western Beijing apartment. 'Some even said I was wasting time on trivial business and ignoring my main responsibilities.'
But having watched many US lawyers pursue successful careers as fiction writers, he pushed ahead, juggling his duties as a jurist and full-time professor.
He owes much to his in-laws. Having been sent to the northern province of Heilongjiang at the age of 16 during the Cultural Revolution, he returned to Beijing in the late 1970s as a plumber with just six years of formal education. After meeting his future wife - a doctor - he became concerned her parents might oppose the union, spurring him to sit for the newly re-opened national exams. He passed, but with mediocre scores that limited his options to economics or law. 'Although I didn't know anything about law, I thought it probably suited me more because I was so bad at maths,' he says.
Although becoming an 'accidental' law student improved his marriage prospects, it forced him to put aside his writing while at Renmin University and, later, during a doctoral degree at Northwestern Law School in Illinois. He went to the US with his wife and daughter in the autumn of 1992 on a scholarship and received his doctor of juridical science from the Northwestern Law School in a little more than a year. 'I was told I had broken some kind of record,' he says. 'Generally speaking, to get an SJD requires three to five years.'
Although He Jiahong could have stayed on in the US to continue his legal research, he decided to return to China at the end of 1993 because he felt 'China was in bad need of law professionals'. On his return, he resumed teaching at Renmin University, switching focus from investigation law to Chinese evidence law.
