The Copper and the Dragon

Guest blog from Stephen Collier

Zoë Sharp 

I'm playing a substitute this week, as I'm attending the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate. So, I'm delighted to welcome fellow crime author, Stephen Collier, to talk a little about his road to publication with his latest crime thriller, Crimson Dragon, set in Hong Kong, London, and Northampton. Take it away, Steve!

There comes a time when ‘the need of the one outweighs the needs of the many.’ Any Trekkies out there will know of that idiom. For me, that time came about ten years ago when I realised that despite having retired as a police officer after thirty years of service in 2005, I was still working in my own business. I went off to far-flung places such as Hong Kong and New Zealand, being away from home, living out of a suitcase and not doing what I should have been doing, having a relaxing retirement and generally living life to the full.

 

But it wasn’t, and I didn’t.

 

One of my greatest desires was always to write a novel. It always had been, but I never did anything about it until 2012. Several external forces came into play that year - too many to bore you with here, so the decision to write my debut novel began and Blind Murder was independently published in 2014.

 

The glimmer of an idea for my latest novel, Crimson Dragon, came as I studied for my MA in creative crime fiction writing at the University of East Anglia. 

 

I had spent five years on a contract with Hong Kong Police. I felt my experiences in Hong Kong would make a good setting. The knowledge I gained of how the province worked post-handover was a window on how a police force with a fundamental evolution in English laws and procedures worked with or against the cultural history of a society much older than the United Kingdom and now under Chinese Communist rule.

It turned out that not much had changed. Senior Officers and constables serving before the handover were still British ex-pats, and the Force tended to look West for their information instead of East. I doubt whether it is the same now as they stopped recruiting ex-pats in 1996. 

 

Fortunately, I made many friends instead of just work colleagues during my time there, with which I remain in touch. During the writing phase, if there were any questions I needed to ask, they were all happy to divulge information. For example, I needed to know where the public mortuary was on the Island, and Google can only offer so much information. It’s at Sai Wan if you’re interested, and it’s not a usual place to go when your hosts are giving you a tour!

 

I am also thankful that one of my Hong Kong friends is an amateur photographer – and an excellent one. (@kevC_photo, on Instagram). I asked him to go and find a good scene for the book and what he came up with was the one you see on the book cover, suitably ‘crimsoned’.

 

I got invited back in late 2018, so with the book in mind and still not finished, I explored it on my own and with my colleagues in our free time. I’ve never been a great lover of cities, I must say, but Hong Kong is one of those places that usually ends up on many peoples ‘bucket lists’ as it was on mine. But it is one of those places that gets under your skin. It’s noisy. It’s full of the capitalist culture on which it grew up. It’s friendly – in the right places. It’s hot – but not all the time. And the food is superb. Interestingly, I rarely go out and get a Chinese takeaway here at home. It’s just not the same.

 

When I started writing, I knew nothing of the creative writing industry other than having a good understanding of the English language and reading all sorts of books. In my naivety, the mere fact that one had a shiny new Master of Arts degree and that it would get me the agent and the publisher I needed to get Crimson Dragon onto the shelves with a trad publishing contact was short-sighted - how stupid was I!

 

We all get rejection letters (or, more accurately, a compliment slip) and emails. It is something that novelists must weather and grow a thick skin - wrong place - wrong time, and all that. So, in the end, I published through Matador.

 

The story brings Hong Kong together with my hometown of Northampton and Chinatown in London. At the time of writing the story, there were big news stories about cyber-crime and data leaking, so initially, that became the novel’s main thrust. Over time, though, that premise seemed to recede into a simple story thread.

The final product, however, belonged to abduction, murders and less about cyber-crime. And if I’m honest, I think the book is better for it.

 

Crimson Dragon introduces us to new characters in my fictional world. Hong Kong Detective Inspector of Police, Mandy Lee and UK Police Constable Ed Roberts. Ed is a traffic cop.

 

As a former traffic cop, I prefer to use that department to escape the general crime fiction trope of uniformed officers being somewhat inferior to the detective. In the real world, traffic officers make more arrests for crime than detectives - but that’s another story for another day, perhaps?

So, what was I to do, forget Crimson Dragon and forge on with another story? 

 

Probably. 

 

It resulted in Crimson Dragon lounging on my desktop for eighteen or so months while I dealt with the death of both my parents within six months of each other. I had no desire to write. I had no desire to do much at all. And there it stayed until I sent it off for a review one day, just because the opportunity came my way. I thought nothing of it until a few weeks later when I got it back with some very positive comments.

 

It’s funny how the muse works. I came up with a different story arc, integrated into the main body of the story and based on some experiences whilst a police firearms officer. 

 

I set about re-editing, rewriting whole chapters; some got trashed, some got resurrected. I can honestly say it has been a work drenched in blood, sweat and tears.

But it’s out there, ready to be snatched up by Hollywood or become a million best seller. I can dream, can’t I?

Stephen Collier is a retired police officer and business owner. He has written three crime fiction novels and a non-fiction police manual. He has an MA in creative crime fiction writing, and Stephen’s books can be found on his website https://www.stephen-collier.com/real-books. Also available on the Troubador website, Amazon and all other outlets to order. He lives in the idyllic Northamptonshire countryside with his partner Sarah and four cats. 

This Week's Word of the Week is gargoyle, meaning a grotesque carved spout designed to divert water away from the side of a building. It comes from the Old French gargoule, meaning throat. So, if it's on the side of a building just for decoration, it's a grotesque rather than a true gargoyle.

Desmond the grotesque having a stare-out competition
with Dido the cat. (Dido is the one at the bottom
of the picture...)

Guest Blogger: Brian Stoddart--Asian Postcolonial Echoes

Jeff--Saturday

 I arrived on Mykonos late Sunday, after an awe-inspiring, wonderful week in Bristol at CrimeFest--and immediately found myself confronting bureaucratic challenges and sharing in friends' personal tragedies. It's been a rough week. But it's ended on a high note, because out of the blue came a request from my long-time friend, Dr. Brian Stoddart, offering to post this primer on what's actually going on in the mysterious venues of Hong Kong and Malaysia. Believe me, it's well worth your while to read this post, for Brian knows of what he speaks.

Professor Stoddart is now a full time writer, after a storied university career culminating in service as Vice-Chancellor/President at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.  He's subsequently served as a consultant on higher education reform for the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the European Union in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. 

Now based in Queenstown, New Zealand, Brian writes the Superintendent Chris Le Fanu historical crime series set in 1920s  Madras, British India. The most recent, "A Straits Settlement," was long-listed for New Zealand’s 2017 Ngaio Marsh Award and the first, "A Madras Miasma," was among CrimeFictionLover’s 2014 Top Ten debut books, a list that included Sarah Hilary, Clare Donoghue and Eva Dolan. His "A House in Damascus" won a gold medal award for best creative non-fiction and was a No 1 on Amazon Middle East travel.

 He is also a serious photographer and delivers history and culture lectures on board cruise ships--an avocation of which I'm intensely jealous.:)

Welcome, Brian Stoddart!

ASIAN POSTCOLONIAL ECHOES

Serendipitously, I recently found myself back in the Asian present but reflecting on its past.

I was in Hong Kong for a very modern reason, the stock exchange launch of an Australian private college for which I chair the council and sit on the board. Like most of Asia (used here as a shorthand only), Hong Kong is much changed two decades after its return to China by the United Kingdom which had run the place since the Opium Wars.

It has is increasingly hard now to find the quirky, the unusual or even the genuine Hong Kong. The Hollywood Road antique shops have been raided by wealthy Chinese now scouring the world in search of treasures to take home to where they belong, and for whom money is no object. This new Hong Kong is epitomised by its efficient airport that replaces the old Kai Tak one where flights in past laundry fluttering on apartment balconies was always an adventure. The main view on the way into this new one is of the about to be opened Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge that is really an elevated road and a tribute to engineering and vision.

But in the streets of Mong Kok and elsewhere, it is still possible to find all the elements that made the Shaw Brothers action films and Bruce Lee so famous, and that were captured so brilliantly by photographers like Fan Ho.

And some of those elements are found in the novels of Chan Ho-kei who deserves a wide reading in the West. http://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/the-borrowed-by-chan-ho-kei/ Kwan Chun-dok, his Hong Kong police force protagonist, experiences the city both before and after 1997 and charts the behavioural, political and social shifts that have occurred there.

At the heart of all that, of course, lies Hong Kong’s transition from the veneer of a British order to one that many still regard as a veneer of a Chinese one. That included the rise of the triads that had connections into China via groups like the Green Gang that aided Chiang Kai-shek’s struggle against the rise of Mao. Those gangs dominated the rampant drugs and sex industries and, like Shanghai, Hong Kong became a global centre. Throughout that colonial period Hong Kong experienced a strong British commercial, financial, legal, police and military fraternity that floated above the real Hong Kong.

Inevitably, cross-cultural clashes arose, like the 1952 murder case that saw British soldiers convicted for killing a Chinese woman. http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2124276/hong-kong-murder-files-british-soldiers-sentenced

Towards the end of that colonial period the crime range widened. In the 1970s, for example, Chief Superintendent Peter Godber of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force was returned to the colony from Britain to face corruption charges on which he was convicted. East had definitely met West.

The triads continued in the form of characters like “Broken Tooth” Koi who ran Macau and once made a film to memorialise his life. And more recently Carson Yeung, once owner of Birmingham City Football Club, was imprisoned for money laundering over $700 million. 

The coincidence was that while I was contemplating all this in Hong Kong, in came news that Malaysia’s dominant political party for over sixty years had been defeated by a coalition led by 92 years old Dr Mahathir Mohamad and assisted by Anwar Ibrahim.

Now here was a real colonial and postcolonial story.

Britain took over the region during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and ruled through three agencies: the Federated Malay States, the Unfederated Malay States, and the Straits Settlements. The last of those became the best known, perhaps, involving Singapore, Malacca and Penang.

My most recent novel, A Straits Settlement, has Superintendent Chris Le Fanu of the Indian Police Service come to Penang, ostensibly pursuing a case but really escaping a tyrant boss back in India. While there, he encounters the distinctive cultural patterns of the Malayan peninsula, mainly in the form of Jenlin Koh, a Straits Chinese woman.

Like the rest of the British Empire, Malaya (the Malayan Union was formed in 1946) had specific cultural forms that led directly to this most recent political upheaval. From the beginning, the British ruled over a mixture of autochthonous Malays, immigrant Indians (mainly Tamils and Punjabis) and immigrant Chinese. The latter came mainly from southern China with a myriad of languages and cultures. Some married into the Malay community, producing the distinctive Straits Chinese or Peranakan community of Jenlin Koh.

Given that heady brew, writers like Somerset Maugham, Anthony Burgess, Joseph Conrad, Noel Barber and Lesley Thomas understandably all set novels there. Maugham was notorious for enjoying the hospitality provided by his many hosts then casting them unattractively in his books. Those writers traced the British presence through early colonial times into the World War II Japanese occupation and subsequent Communist “emergency” then, eventually, independence in 1957 before the 1963 separation from Singapore that formed Malaysia.

Among Malaya’s colonial sensations, few rivalled the 1951 assassination of Sir Henry Lovell Goldsworthy Gurney, the High Commissioner, by Communist insurgents led by Chin Peng. Gurney was born in north Devon, went to Winchester then served during World War I before going to Kenya and the colonial service in 1921. Then came Jamaica in 1934, back to East Africa. and Colonial Secretary in the Gold Coast. In 1948 he was became Colonial Secretary in Palestine, overseeing the creation of Israel. From there he was appointed to Malaya.

Chin Peng was born Perak, Malaya. A Chinese, he believed that Malays received undue consideration. Through World War II, however, he was active against the Japanese, working closely with British forces that moved back in during 1943. He received an OBE for his services. After the war, Chin Peng climbed through the Communist Party of Malaya ranks, resenting what he thought was Britain’s undemocratic creation of the Malayan Union. That led to the armed rebellion remembered as the Malayan Emergency.

Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer led the British military campaign and was appointed High Commissioner following Gurney’s death. Templer later became a key British government adviser during the Suez crisis.

Today, Gurney Drive in Penang and Gurney Road in Singapore remember Templer’s assassinated predecessor.

Chin Peng struggled on until the final days of the Communist Party was finished, holed up in the jungle on the Malaysian side of the Thai border. The University Utara Malaysia is carved into that jungle, and I visited it many times while running one of Australia’s first offshore campuses in Penang. It was strange to be there then because Chin Peng was still alive – he died in exile in Bangkok during 2013.

Like Chan Ho-kei’s cop, Mahathir Mohamad traversed this colonial and post-colonial journey. He became a medical doctor then joined the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) in 1946. It was 1964 before he entered Parliament but he was already a leading advocate of special treatment for Malays as outlined in his influential book, The Malay Dilemma. He fell out with Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore, suggesting too much Chinese influence was at play there. Mahathir fell out with his own leader, Tunku Abdul Rahman, too, and left parliament but returned later to become Prime Minister from 1981 until 2003.

His re-emergence is remarkable, if only for the rapprochement with Anwar Ibrahim. The pair were Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister for much of Mahathir’s ascendancy and up until the Asian financial crisis of 1997 when they began to disagree. While working there through that period, an Indian friend told me a story. It had Mahathir suggesting he was the better politician because he bribed everybody whereas Anwar bribed only Malays. True or not, it captured the political order where Malays held power, Chinese provided capital while Indians dominated business and labour. What is known in the West as “corruption” certainly existed then, as a cost of doing business.

Anwar suffered after the rift. He was jailed for corruption and then for sodomy. Freed, he was later tried again and served more time for sodomy right up until this new election. In all that period he was heralded in the West as a friend of democracy and a martyr to Mahathir. It is forgotten that he was central to the Mahathir regime for a long time and part of all the deals. His story is testament to how Asian complexity is often overlooked or even ignored.

So why is Mahathir back, allegedly to hand power over to Anwar within a couple of years? The short answer involves the decline of UMNO under Najib Razak who became Prime Minister in 2009. He comes from political royalty. His father, Abdul Razak, was the second Prime Minister, his uncle Hussein Onn the third. Najib himself was educated in the United Kingdom then entered parliament at twenty three to begin a storied career in senior positions.

But his Prime Ministership has been marked by scandal and corruption. One problem involved continuing rumours about the 2006 murder of a Mongolian woman being associated with people close to Najib. In 2009 two policemen were convicted then later acquitted of the murder, but in 2015 another court again found them guilty. One fled to Australia which would not extradite him back to a country carrying the death penalty. Now with the change of government, Mongolian officials want the case reopened.

Meanwhile, up popped the 1MDB story. This was a Malaysian government development company fund created in 2009 to enhance foreign direct investment projects. Its total holdings are effectively unknown, but a United States Department of Justice indictment suggests at least $US3.5 billion have disappeared into private hands. Anwar has long been a critic, identifying Najib as a key figure suggested as a major beneficiary. Some accounts have Najib him receiving $US800 million. 

Much of the story line swings around characters like Jho Low. A classic “flash Harry” who attended Harrow then the Wharton School and later befriended Najib’s stepson, Jho Low runs a Hong Kong-based finance company behind or associated with major global purchases. Those include the Park Lane Hotel in New York, EMI’s music publishing arm, and Reebok. He and Najib’s stepson also ran Red Granite pictures that financed The Wolf of Wall Street.

That movie connection has him associated with women like Paris Hilton and recently, Australian Miranda Kerr who has returned a substantial amount of jewellery following indications it was purchased with pilfered 1MDB funds,

Now the new Finance Minister, Lim Guan Eng who was a successful Chief Minister in Penang, has ordered a full 1MDB audit. Mahathir had already placed a travel ban on Najib and his family. Now, police raided Najib’s home and offices to confiscate seventy-two bags of jewellery, two hundred and eighty four boxes of luxury handbags, several luxury watches and substantial amounts of cash.

The war of words continues.

We can only imagine what Somerset Maugham might have made of it all, but one thing is clear – crime writers have plenty of material in all these colonial into postcolonial conditions even if, as the old saying has it, “you couldn’t make up this stuff.” Reality continues to be stranger than fiction.

Perhaps it will be a new case for Shamini Flint’s Inspector Singh.

--Brian in for Jeff

Travel

Stanley - Thursday

Last week I indulged my addiction to airline food:  from peaceful, beautiful, and grey Copenhagen, to the City of Lights for a quick transfer and a couple of glasses of bubbly, to beautiful Cape Town at a scorching 34° C, to an even hotter Johannesburg, to Hong Kong for an infusion of energy, and finally to idyllic New Zealand to celebrate a good friend's son's wedding.

This week I want to share a few thoughts and pictures of Hog Kong, a city I first visited in 1979.  Even then, before its reversion to China, it was a bustling city.  But the bustle was offset by the pervasive colonial lifestyle enjoyed by the ex-pats.  Fortunately a cousin who lived there was able to show me around, introduce me to some of his friends, so I often had company as I toured the amazing city state.

Tall, short, new, old - Hong Kong

One of the enduring memories of that first visit was a day-long hike, complete with picnic, that I made on Lantau island.  Lantau was not connected to the mainland by any structure such as a bridge or rail link.  The ferry was it!  Lantau at the time was basically uninhabited, except for a picturesque Buddhist monastery up in the hills - a fine target to reach on the hike.  It made for a striking contrast to the bustle a few kilometres across the water.

Today Lantau is the site of the new Hong Kong International Airport, a massive, modern, efficient hub to almost every airline.  No more the curved approach to the old airport, dodging hills and skyscrapers, with the sea waiting patiently at the end of the runway.

Each time I have visited Hong Kong, I've been struck by its energy and growth.  But this time I was more than struck - I was blown away.  New buildings are going up everywhere, and the sky is filled with cranes.  Huge numbers of people have moved there, mainly from China proper, but also from every country on the planet.  The Hong Kong government website has this to say:

At the south-eastern tip of China, Hong Kong covers Hong Kong Island, Lantau Island, the Kowloon Peninsula and the New Territories, including 262 outlying islands. Between Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon Peninsula lies Victoria Harbour, one of the world's most renowned deep-water harbours.

• Total area: 1 104 square kilometres

• Land developed: less than 25%

• Country parks and nature reserves: 40%

Hong Kong's population was approximately 7.24 million in 2014. People of Chinese descent comprise the vast majority of the population, with foreign nationals comprising 8%.

• Population density: 6 650 people per square kilometre

• Crude birth rate: 8.6 per 1000

• Percentage of population Chinese descent: 91%

• Other significant national groups

• Philippines (168 850 total)

• Indonesia (165 170 total)

• India (28 920 total).

By comparison, New York City is 790 square kilometres with a density of 10,750 per square kilometre.  However, if one only takes the developed part of Hong Kong, the population density is over 26,000 per kilometre.

It is a city of huge contrasts, rich and poor, old (some) and new (lots), original and fake.

Other than walking, walking, and walking, and being accosted every other step either to have a suit and shirts made by the next day or to buy a genuinely fake Rolex, I took Mette to a delightful hang-over from colonial times, namely Afternoon Tea at the iconic Peninsula Hotel.  I am sure, not that long ago, that the clientele would have been almost exclusively White.  Now one sees a White face or two, every now and again.

A truly colonial hotel

One has to arrive in style

The foyer

The tea room - full every day

Wow!

The presentation is pretty good

Yummy!

I think it's a city well worth visiting, but, if you do so, make sure you have the time to travel outside the building limits to the New Territories or to some of the islands.

Here are our pictures.

14 stories of bamboo scaffolding

Impressive buildings

The view from the Star Ferry from Kowloon to Hong Kong island

Another view

Luxury goods are everywhere

Luxury

Real luxury, but fakes are everywhere

The Chinese like gold.

The Chinese love gold!

Even odd gold

Chow Tai Fook jewellers are on every block

Lots of colours

There are watches for sale everywhere - not all gebuine

People, cars, buildings

Chestnuts, Hong Kong style

Oh to be in the air-conditioning business

Beautiful old trees are supported.

Buy, buy, buy!

Even Marks and Sparks is there.

Hong Kong - an amazing place to visit

And I didn't even have time to visit the docks and the tens of thousands of containers.