Murder, he writes

Author and professor with Renmin University of China He Jiahong. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Law and literature, two very different streams seem to converge in He Jiahong's writings. The 62-year-old is a well-known law professor at Renmin University of China, where he teaches criminal law at arguably the country's finest law school, with his focus being on evidence and investigation.

He has also written a series of crime thrillers in Chinese. Set in 1990s China, the series'

protagonist is a lawyer, who solves some really strange cases like a detective.

The second installment of the series, Black Holes, was published in English last year by Penguin Books, following the first installment Hanging Devils (in English) being printed in 2012.

"I studied the law, but I love literature," He says. "So when I started writing the series, I tried to combine them."

Born in 1953, his first manuscript was a 200,000-word novel that originated from his experiences of working on a rural farm in Northeast China's Heilongjiang province, during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), but it never got published.

In 1977, he came to Beijing and became a plumber, while secretly dreaming of becoming a novelist. He then met his future wife, whose family wouldn't agree to their marriage unless he got into college. Even though love made him put literature aside for a while, it was worth it. He passed the college entrance exam in 1979 and joined Renmin University of China as a law student.

He devoted himself to legal studies as China begun to re-establish its system of laws as a pressing need in the years following the "cultural revolution".