How Hong Kong ex-journalist mined true crime for detective fiction
In three decades covering the Hong Kong underworld, Henry Mong reported on some of the city’s most notorious crimes and got into a scandal or two of his own – experiences he’s now drawing on for compelling novels
For 30 years, Henry Mong Hon-ming mingled with triad bosses, drug lords and murderers. He was no accomplice, but an investigative crime reporter. Although he left the industry nine years ago to become a project planner for an entertainment company, he still remembers the thrill of being on the crime beat and covering some of the city’s most notorious crimes, such as the kidnapping and disappearance of Chinachem founder Teddy Wang Teh-huei and the Hello Kitty murder.
“I was writing about him up until his arrest [in 1998]. I interviewed him so many times, I managed to finish a 14-page story about his crimes in just two days,” says Mong. “In the ’90s, when he was sometimes away from Macau and out of the police’s reach, I had a way to contact him and he would reply, informing me of his next move.”
Mong says the triad boss trusted him so much, in fact, that “he asked me to help him write his autobiography”.
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But eventually the law caught up with Wan, and by the time he was released from jail in 2012, Wan told Mong he no longer wanted to be in the spotlight or for his story to be told.