Review | From triad murders to wild boar barbecues: Hong Kong police officer’s memoir is big on colour, short on action
- Hong Kong Beat by Simon Roberts has plenty of period detail but tends to fizzle out just as things get interesting
- While much has changed, there is plenty that remains the same, both in terms of police priorities and the city in general
Hong Kong Beat
by Simon Roberts
Blacksmith Books
3/5 stars
Simon Roberts’ Hong Kong Beat is the latest in a spate of eye-opening memoirs by pre-handover expat Hong Kong police officers, including Les Bird’s A Small Band of Men (2019), and Chris Emmett’s Hong Kong Policeman (2014) and Hong Kong Police: Inside the Lines (2018), which show how much has changed and how much remains the same, both in the Hong Kong police’s priorities and the city in general.
While this latest contribution is full of period colour and amusing observations, Roberts’ career is a bit less close to the centre of the action and his anecdotes correspondingly somewhat less dramatic than those of his former colleagues.
The book’s opening section pretty much follows the same pattern as the others: wide-eyed boy who wants to see the world leaves dreary 1970s Britain, arrives in Hong Kong and has his mind blown by the place. He goes to training school – in Roberts’ case, he later ends up spending a couple of years teaching there, too – then starts work and has his mind blown all over again.
Roberts describes an advertisement for inspectors in the Hong Kong police that sounds almost identical to the one Bird mentions in A Small Band of Men, and a virtually identical interview process, along with similar observations about the training school, the mandatory haircut, the learning of Cantonese and the runs up Brick Hill (Nam Long Shan). Indeed, Bird himself shows up early in the book, taking Roberts out on a launch to give him an experience of Marine Police duties.
