I had thought that my story might revolve around events before, after or during the events of June 1989, and arranged by telephone to visit the offices of CNN in Wangfujing Street to see their archive of unbroadcast footage taken in and around the square. As it happened, there was a power cut (there were many in Beijing in those days), and when I reached the block where CNN had their offices on the fourth floor, the elevator was not available and I had to walk up.

When I got there the office was empty, except for bureau chief Mike Chinoy and an assistant provided by the Chinese government. But, of course, without power it was impossible to view the footage, and although I was able to sit and chat to Mike about the events of two years before, I always wondered if it was more than coincidence that prevented me from seeing that video.

I left Beijing empty-handed on that trip, but had learned a great deal, and was even more determined to use China as a setting for my next book. No one had set a crime thriller in Beijing at that point, just as no one had used Moscow as a setting before Gorky Park. I was absolutely intent on being the first to do it in China.

In the end, it was another six years before I returned. But this time I had a story, and a precious introduction to the Chinese police from a man revered by the country’s top cops.

The late Dr. Richard Ward was an American criminologist who started life as a detective in the New York City police department. Sickened by the corruption he encountered on a daily basis, he quit to enrol at university and take a degree in criminology. His rise to acclaim by the international justice community followed quickly. He became the vice-chancellor of the University of Illinois in Chicago, where he set up an organisation called the Office of International Criminal Justice (OICJ), which brought police departments around the world together in an exchange of methods and information.

Then during the 1990s he spent several years in Shanghai training the top five hundred Chinese police officers in the latest Western policing techniques, and became a legend in the Chinese police.

Dick was my starting point when I began research on what was to become The Firemaker. I knew what my story would be, and that my two central characters would be a Beijing cop and an American female pathologist. I had already found technical advisors on pathology, and genetics (the subject of my story). But getting even a foothold on the steep learning curve that would be required to write authoritatively about the Chinese police was proving next to impossible. There was simply no information about their structure or methods anywhere, not in libraries or bookstores, nor on an internet then still in its infancy.