CHINESE CRIME NOVEL NAVIGATES WATERS IN SMASHING SUCCESS

Zhou Haohui, the latest author to catch the wave of Chinese crime fiction crashing on international shores, had an unsatisfying job teaching engineering at a university outside of Beijing in 2007 when he began publishing — online — the novels that would earn him a cultlike following in China. These books — a trilogy about a police hunt for a vengeful killer — went into print two years later, ultimately selling

more than 1.2 million copies. Crime, Zhou says, is a universal theme, which is why detective stories or police thrillers (even from an authoritarian system like China’s) can more easily transcend cultural divides than, say, historical fiction. Zhou acknowledged that the censors forced him to make changes in his books, but he said that novels tend to get more leeway than movies or content online.