Hong Kong—the “Fragrant Harbor” or the “Barren Rock”? The Cantonese named it the former; the early British colonialists in the mid-19th century the latter. Captured by the Royal Navy after the First Opium War (1839-1842) and politically cauterized from the mainland of China by a most unequal treaty signed in the face of British gunboats. Hong Kong Island was to be England’s in perpetuity, with Kowloon and the New Territories (that are essentially part of the Chinese mainland) leased for 99 years. In 1997 those 99 years came to an end, Britain surrendered the territory in the “Handover,” and Hong Kong reverted to Chinese control becoming a “Special Administrative Region” of the People’s Republic.
One of the most densely populated cities in the world, stunning banks of high rises surround a harbor above which rises the Peak, once home to only the most senior of Colonial officials and now only the wealthiest of tycoons. Across Victoria Harbor, Kowloon is raucous, always busy and thanks to the city’s obsession with neon, never dark as you pass through Tsim Sha Tsui, Yau Ma Tei, Mong Kok and Kowloon’s other districts. Away from the hustle and bustle the islands of Lantau, Lamma and dozens of smaller oases have beaches and coves to explore, while the more sparsely populated New Territories extend to the border with mainland China at Lo Wu.
The quintessential Hong Kong of densely packed streets and the rhythmic cacophony of Cantonese contrasting with verdant islands and unexpected countryside is perhaps best captured in John le Carré’s sole Asian outing, The Honourable Schoolboy (1977). The Hong Kong weather “burns hot and clear and breathless” as Jerry Westerby wanders from the legendary Foreign Correspondents’ Club to his safe house on Cloudview Road in down-at-heel North Point. Le Carré, as ever, hits all the marks—the FCC, the American Club, snobby cocktail parties, the “Peak Mafia” of HSBC bankers, the Governor, senior military commanders, ruddy-faced club stewards and the odd resident OBEs and CBEs of the British community trading on past glories. Then down to noodles in the backstreets of Kennedy Town and compromising indiscretions in the Girly Bars of Wan Chai. The novel still stands as perhaps the most intricate description of post-war colonial Hong Kong in literature.
Others have delved into Hong Kong’s past and there are some old time bestselling blockbusters, notably James Clavell’s twin doorstoppers Tai-Pan (1966), where Hong Kong’s foundation as a colony is a story with plenty of crimes, and later Cold War thriller Noble House (1981). Perhaps most people thinking of Hong Kong-set novels capturing the 1950s and 1960s will recall Han Suyin’s Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1952) and Richard Mason’s The World of Suzie Wong (1957). However, none of these, strictly speaking, are crime novels—though you might count stealing other people’s territory, their secrets, creating an opium-selling empire, being forced to be an illegal immigrant and working as a prostitute as minor infractions of the law! But we’ll stick with genre and go with the rather lesser known A Coffin From Hong Kong (1962) by James Hadley Chase. When a Hong Kong girl turns up dead in Nelson Ryan’s office, the Pasadena P.I. is in the frame and gets himself on a plane to Hong Kong to prove his innocence. Chase was an English writer who started out in the late 1930s imitating the American hardboiled tough guy style (Orwell famously criticized the nihilism of Chase’s writing in his 1944 essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish”). It’s classic pulp storytelling but the Hong Kong scenes have a rough realism that gives the reader a pretty good idea of the Colony’s more shady alleyways in the mid-1960s.
Things get really murky in Hong Kong crime after the Handover in 1997. Christopher West’s 1999 Death of a Red Mandarin sees Inspector Wang of Beijing’s Public Security Bureau despatched south to ascertain just how a senior Communist Party official ended up a handcuffed corpse, floating in Hong Kong harbor. Wang is faced with the most politically sensitive of cases—the official’s body is hauled out of the water on the eve of the Handover. West has also written several other policiers featuring Chinese cop Inspector (Second Class) Bao Zheng, set in Beijing and well worth reading.
Humphrey Hawksley is a BBC journalist who was posted to Hong Kong and Beijing in the run up to the Handover. He also started to specialize in thrillers that looked at geopolitical scenarios that were possibly just around the corner. Hawksley’s Ceremony of Innocence (1998; and more recently reissued in e-book format) features a British ex-Hong Kong cop drowning in whisky after his Chinese wife and two kids have disappeared into the vastness of China and appear untraceable. He is drawn into post-Handover conspiracies involving the CIA, Mi6 and the Chinese state.
There’s a slew of true crime on Hong Kong; too many to list them all. You could start with Kate Whitehead’s Hong Kong Murders (2001), which covers 14 deaths, each of which reflect, in some way, on the Cantonese way of life. There are plenty of triads, kidnappings gone wrong, some sad suicides and one side trip to nearby Macao. Anyone who visited Hong Kong in the early 2000s will remember the sensational Nancy Kissel case—an expat wife and mother, married to a rich investment banker; the couple seemed to have it all. Then life became a nightmare as the so-called “Milkshake Murder” case exploded. Nancy was accused of murdering her husband (with a poisoned milkshake before bashing his head in!) to get his cash; she said it was self-defense against his cocaine-fueled violent rages. Her 2005 trial attracted hour upon hour of coverage in Hong Kong, enthralled the expat and local community alike while the jury’s decision astounded everyone. A year later an unexpected twist threw the case back into the spotlight. American true crime writer Joe McGinniss traveled to Hong Kong to unravel the story in Never Enough (2007).
A couple more great nonfiction accounts of falling through the cracks in Hong Kong worth noting. Chris Thrall’s Eating Smoke (2014) details Thrall’s own decline from Royal Marine to homeless meth addict. To fund his addiction he worked for the notorious 14K triad in the Wan Chai nightclub and brothel district (where Suzy Wong once plied her trade). The heat, the neon, triad craziness, the meth… it’s a long drawn out psychotic urban nightmare. Back a generation and American GI’s on R&R in Hong Kong from Vietnam often enjoyed a pipe or two of opium. If they did then they enriched Peter Hui, the subject of Jonathan Chamberlain’s fascinating biography King Hui: The Man Who Owned All the Opium in Hong Kong (2007).
Chris Emmett joined the Royal Hong Kong Police in 1970, fresh from Liverpool. He moved among all three levels of Hong Kong society—the super privileged, mostly British, expats; the street level masses of the Cantonese; and the underworld of triads, prostitutes, drug dealers and, a theme that sadly recurs when dealing with Hong Kong’s notorious police force, corruption. He details his career and relationship with the colony in Hong Kong Policeman (2014).
Chinese-language crime writing from Hong Kong is sadly little translated. Energetic local English language publisher Blacksmith Books has tapped into a great market with retired pathologist Feng Chi-shun’s Hong Kong Noir: Fifteen True Tales from the Dark Side of the City (2013). When not examining cadavers Feng owned a Kowloon dive bar. His customers were largely triads and they liked to tell stories. The girl with the eagle tattoo, the Hello Kitty murder, the taxi driver from hell, the end of triad boss “Broken Tooth” Koi are just some of the tales Feng recalls.
Recently things have got a bit more noir-y in the local crime-writing scene. And so, finally, to Chan Ho-kei, Hong Kong’s latest crime writing sensation. The Borrowed (originally published in Chinese as 13.67 in 2015) is a lengthy and ambitious novel about the legendary Detective Kwan Chun-dok, with a 100 percent conviction rate, who came to the height of his crime-busting powers in the 1960s and 1970s. Kwan has seen it all—the Leftist unrest of the 1960s, the police mutinies of the 1970s, the violent triad crime waves of the 1980s, the transfer of sovereignty in the 1990s and the social changes of the new millennium. Now he is in a coma, able only to communicate with a “yes” or a “no” to his acolyte Inspector Lok, the head of the Kowloon East Crime Unit. A contemporary murder of a leading Cantonese businessman reveals a family’s secrets, but also takes us back through Kwan’s career.
Chan Ho-kei has built a reputation in Hong Kong and Taiwan for his crime writing winning the Soji Shimada Mystery Award, though The Borrowed is his first novel to be translated into English. Now English readers can revel in Chan’s descriptions of Hong Kong, like this recreation of the crowded, neon-bathed Mongkok district of Kowloon:
Mong Kok was dazzling as always. The multi-colored neon lights, glittering shop windows, throngs of pedestrians—as if the city knew no night. This bustling scene was a microcosm of Hong Kong, a city that relied on finance and consumption for survival, though these pillars were not as sturdy as people supposed.
The Borrowed is a big book, an attempt to use the genre of the crime novel to explain the social and political twists and turns of the last half-century in Hong Kong and, perhaps, what the rather uncertain future may hold. It’s the last book in this list, but perhaps a good place to begin any journey into the dark underbelly of Hong Kong.
