I also discovered that not only were the Chinese police avid consumers of crime fiction, they also loved to write stories. So much so that there is a course at the Beijing University of Public Security (the police university) entirely devoted to the history of Western crime fiction, and the propaganda department publishes several monthly magazines featuring short crime stories written by serving police officers.

The very first day of my first research trip I was taken to the University of Public Security. There I was introduced to the dean of the facility, and to a young serving police officer who had graduated some years before but returned from time to time to lecture to students. He was unusually tall and his nickname was “Clinton” (Bill was still then US President) because it rhymed with his name, Lin Tong. I spent some time chatting to “Clinton” after our initial meeting, and was hugely impressed by his quiet presence and thoughtful modesty. He immediately became the model for my Chinese cop, Li Yan.

That first research trip for The Firemaker was also my introduction to the man who would become my great friend and mentor, Dai Yisheng. He had been a firm friend of Dick Ward, and now became my sherpa during that and all subsequent visits to China. Mr. Dai was a retired policeman, and one of the most educated and well-read people I have ever met. A graduate of the American University in Beijing in the late nineteen-forties, he won a post-grad place at Cambridge University in England. For better or worse, this coincided with the Communist Party’s creation of the People’s Republic in 1949. He was torn. Should he stay to help build the new China, or take up his place at Cambridge? He decided to stay. But as an intellectual, perhaps considered dangerous to the new regime, he was ordered to become a policeman—in Tibet.

He and his wife were dispatched from their home in Sichuan Province, and told they would have to walk to his new job in Tibet. It took them three perilous months, traversing rivers in flood, trekking through forests, climbing mountains, before they finally reached his posting.