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Crime of the times

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What does a poet do when verse fails him? For Qiu Xiaolong, the solution lay in crime fiction. It was 1997 - just under a decade after the mainland writer and poet left to study literature in the US and two years since he had made his first visit back to his hometown of Shanghai.

Qiu wanted to express his thoughts about the historic changes he observed in Chinese society, but poetry proved too personal. He needed a broader canvas, so over the next few years he set out using his adopted language of English to create a character and a novel reflecting a China in transition.

The result was the first of the hugely popular Inspector Chen mysteries, which have now been translated into about 20 languages, with the latest novel set for release later this year.

On a frosty Beijing night, about two dozen Inspector Chen fans turn up at a bookshop to meet the soft-spoken author. Although Qiu lives with his family in St Louis, Missouri, he returns regularly to the mainland to find fodder for his work.

On the mainland, he is both insider and outsider, having spent the first 35 years of his life in Shanghai before leaving in 1988 on a scholarship to research T.S. Eliot at Washington University in St Louis. Qiu stayed on in the US after the Tiananmen crackdown and it wasn't until 1995 that he returned to see for himself the massive changes taking place on the mainland.

Capitalism had been unleashed, materialism was taking hold and once sancrosanct benefits such as state-assigned housing were disappearing. It was hard to put into verse.

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