"This is the first full-length study in any language of Chinese crime fiction in all eras: ancient, modern, and contemporary. It is also the first book to apply legal scholars' "law and literature" inquiry to the rich field of Chinese legal and literary culture. Familiar Holmesian, quintessentially Chinese, and bizarre East-West hybrids of plots, crimes, detectives, judges, suspects, and ideas of law and corruption emerge from the pages of China's new crime fiction.".

"Informed by contemporary comparative and theoretical perspectives on popular culture and the fiction of crime and detection, this book is based on extensive readings of Chinese crime fiction and interviews - in China and abroad - with the communist regime's exiled and still-in-power security and judicial officers.

It was in the Orwellian year of 1984 that the authorities set out to control China's crime fiction and even to manufacture it themselves - only to find that fiction, like the social phenomena it depicts, seems destined to remain one step ahead of the law."--BOOK JACKET.