Bestselling Beijing murder author turns to Shanghai in the 1930s as inspiration for latest tale

Pit stops I was born in Enfield, in North London, in 1966, and come from a lower-middle class/working-class back­ground and went to the local comprehensive school. My father worked for the Greater London Council. When­ever anyone wanted to dig below a certain level or build a new tube (underground rail) line, they had to consult him because he had maps marked with all the original plague pits (in which victims of the 17th-century bubonic plague were buried).

Everywhere else in the world, tube lines are straight. In London, they curve to avoid the plague pits. Because authorities were not quite sure of the lifetime of the bacillus, you still can’t go into a plague pit.

Shanghai connection My great-grandfather was briefly with the Royal Navy in Shanghai. He had lots of tattoos that he’d had done there just after the first world war. He orga­nised the coaling stations for the Royal Navy ships that came to port. My father was very much into architecture, art deco particularly, so Shanghai was an interest of his even though he never travelled anywhere.

So you had a bit of art deco, a bit of Shanghai, and we used to go up to Chinatown for dinner with knives and forks, not knowing what we were doing; a combination of that and looking at all the Chinese writing ended up with me at university and going to Shanghai to do Chinese. It sort of all came together.