Audiences Love Suspense Dramas, So Cai Jun — Once All the Rage in Suspense Fiction — Has Gone Into the Film and TV Business | 100 People With Ideas

In the early 2000s, when the literary site Rongshuxia was just taking off, Cai Jun was for a time the defining figure in Chinese suspense fiction. Having missed the wave of web literature, he has turned his attention to the film and TV rights to his novels.

On Halloween in 2014, Cai was on a business trip in Shenyang and made time to meet someone he knew only online: a mortician in her early twenties he had chatted with on Weibo. After the meeting he wrote a short story called "A Halloween Fireworks Funeral." A boy drinks himself to death; his body is taken to a funeral home, and the woman who does the corpses' makeup there turns out to be his ex-girlfriend. Once a couple, now divided by death, the two meet again at the funeral home.

Romance plus suspense is a subject Cai returns to again and again — a little frightening to read, with a touch of warmth. "Men who blow hot and cold, endings you don't see coming — back then, not many Chinese writers had work like that," reader Zhang Guimin wrote of Cai on Zhihu. Born in 1978, Cai published his first suspense novel at 22 and has put out one or two new books a year since. That kind of output means he needs a more spontaneous way of working, rather than always mining conversations with online contacts for ideas. Most of the time he writes at the desktop computer at home, taking his stories from news events and from his own life.

These days, though, the name Cai Jun probably isn't as well known as those of the tomb-raiding suspense writers Nanpai Sanshu and Tianxia Bachang, and he may not even be more popular than the newer romance-suspense novelist Ding Mo — whose He Is Coming, Please Close Your Eyes (《他来了，请闭眼》) was adapted into a web series that streamed on Sohu Video last year and, by Sohu's own numbers, drew 1.36 billion views.

Cai made his name earlier, around 2000, when web literature was just emerging — the literary site Rongshuxia was red hot and the New Concept Composition Contest was in full swing. Han Han dropped out of high school and published Triple Door (《三重门》); Annie Baobei's novel Flowers on the Other Shore (《彼岸花》) came out and won her some recognition; Guo Jingming published his first book, The Edge of Love and Pain (《爱与痛的边缘》).

Cai was one of them. In those years he published one book after another — Cat's Eye (《猫眼》), Ghost Inn (《幽灵客栈》), The Deserted Village Apartment (《荒村公寓》). His later novels Heaven's Secret (《天机》) and Murder, Years Like Flowing Water (《谋杀似水年华》) sold more than 14 million copies between them. In 2012, book royalties of 3.1 million yuan put Cai at No. 16 on the Chinese Writers Rich List.

Now, though, measured against either the peers he rose alongside or the newer names in fiction, Cai is no longer the one riding highest. At a signing for his new book The Longest Night (《最漫长的一夜》) at Southeast University in Nanjing, it happened to be raining, and readers still queued up for the novelist Cai Jun. When he sat down for an interview afterward, he produced his other identity: chairman of Haolin Culture.

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Cai never went to a proper university. At 19 he became a junior clerk at Shanghai Post, and stayed for ten years. In 2000, his first story, "The Collapse of Tianbao Stadium" (《天宝大球场的陷落》), appeared on Rongshuxia, written in imitation of Wang Xiaobo. Later, moved by Koji Suzuki's Ring series, he began trying to write fiction that pulled readers along. In 2002 his first novel, Virus (《病毒》), came out, and Cai won that year's People's Literature–Bertelsmann Cup New Writer Award.

Many of Cai's stories come out of his own life. He is a Shanghai native who lived as a child in the attic of his grandmother's house; when he was ten his grandmother died of a cerebral hemorrhage and he transferred to a school in Caojiadu, but that old attic at Lane 799, Tiantong Road later turned up in a piece called "A Secret Night With an Old Best Friend" (《老闺蜜的秘密一夜》). While he was at the Shanghai Postal Bureau, a retired cadre who shared his office kept telling him about the terrifying wolf attacks at Baimaoling Prison in the 1970s — images that later became plot in his fiction.

By 2005, Cai found that fiction could support him. That year The 19th Level of Hell (《地狱的第 19 层》) was published, and his royalties already ran to dozens of times his salary at work. The novel follows a female university student and her teacher searching for cave murals; it was later adapted into the film The 19th Space (《第 19 层空间》), starring the Hong Kong actress Gillian Chung.

Soon, though, readers wanted more than what Cai was giving them, and the verdict "strong start, weak finish" began to spread. Heaven's Secret rates 6.4 on Douban. "Every time I read a Cai Jun novel, the opening feels amazing, so clever — but by the ending you just go, ugh," reader Eddy Shen wrote. Those who found his work short on depth started calling it "newbie suspense" — not an entirely negative label, and one that also explains why Cai's brand of suspense sold so well.

Over the next few years, more suspense-adjacent fiction came into view: Nanpai Sanshu and Tianxia Bachang, for instance. They caught readers' eyes with Ghost Blows Out the Light (《鬼吹灯》) and The Grave Robbers' Chronicles (《盗墓笔记》); those tomb-raiding stories, with their outlandish plots and their struggles of human nature, set off lasting talk the moment they appeared.

Besides the shift in what was popular, Cai also missed the opportunities that came with the internet. Both Ghost Blows Out the Light and The Grave Robbers' Chronicles were first serialized on Qidian, a site that drew in many writers once it launched paid reading, and made the names of quite a few of them.

Jin Maluo, founder of Dumi Media, met Cai around 2008. He has edited several of Cai's books and published the most recent one, The Longest Night 2 (《最漫长的一夜 2》). "This crop of web writers came up around 2006. They used the internet as their main platform, let their work ferment online for a long stretch, and only then brought it into print," Jin told QDaily. "Some writers don't bother with print publishing at all anymore — they publish online and earn from that."

Cai did not catch that train. "I knew early on that web fiction wasn't for me — I worked that out a long time ago," he said in an interview. Sun Hui believes Cai was never a writer "for the web." "Web fiction is more of a service: the first rule is to give readers a thrill, and sometimes authors pad the length with filler. By that measure, Cai's work has always been aimed at traditional publishing." Sun met Cai eight or nine years ago; in 2013 he joined Haolin Culture as editor-in-chief of its publishing arm, where he plans themed book lines and signs new authors.

Forums like Rongshuxia and Tianya Club missed that train too — they stayed free-to-read, never opened a paid model, and could not keep attracting writers able to sustain long serialized fiction. Cai's peers Annie Baobei, Han Han and Guo Jingming also stopped writing online.

Web novels rely on different techniques, business models and distribution than traditional fiction. They tend to be very long and mostly linear, with authors updating on a fixed daily schedule and readers paying to read. Web novelists' incomes are often far larger than those of traditionally published writers, and their reach sometimes carries back into print: Nanpai Sanshu earned 15.8 million yuan in book royalties in 2011, putting him at No. 2 on the Chinese Writers Rich List.

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Unlike his peers, though, Cai never stopped writing fiction. The story collection That Longest Night (《最漫长的那一夜》) is what he has been doing for the past two years — a run of thriller short stories that includes the one about the female mortician. They circle around smog, the Spring Festival trains, WeChat Moments; they sit very close to the present.

To some readers, those preoccupations may look like a distraction from his real job as a suspense novelist. Cai doesn't much care; he answers the "strong start, weak finish" complaint with one word — ambition. "That's normal. From 2010 on, my writing changed direction, and I began to have the ambition to record how society is changing."

Seicho Matsumoto, the Japanese suspense novelist, is Cai's model. "Matsumoto wrote many suspense novels that reflected the reality of Japanese society and described that era. Seiichi Morimura wrote about social reality too, in Proof of the Man (《人证》). Read them today and you find that the Japan they describe closely resembles China now. If we could write with that kind of realism, the impact would be no less than Chai Jing's smog documentary," Cai told QDaily. "In that sense, suspense fiction is well suited to recording the sharpest problems of society today."

Cai has indeed moved closer to the society of the moment. Beyond writing, he has started using his own name to build things.

In 2006, instead of starting to serialize on Qidian, Cai set up a company called Haolin Culture. At first it had three or four people, publishing suspense magazines and books. Then, as demand for adaptations grew, several of Cai's novels were turned into films one after another. In 2008 The Deserted Village Apartment became the film Deserted Village Inn (《荒村客栈》); in 2010 The Deserted Village Apartment itself reached cinemas, with Shawn Yue and Zhang Yuqi among the cast. None of these films made much noise, but Cai saw that something was shifting: traditional publishing was contracting, and the bigger profits were in film and TV.

In 2010, Cai began putting more of his energy into running the company. He built a team, developed suspense stories, worked as an agent for authors and took on screenplay adaptations. That Longest Night holds 33 stories in all, more than a dozen of which are being adapted for the screen. The TV series is being developed jointly by Haolin Culture and SMG Shangshi Pictures, and is expected to air in 2016, while Haishang Pictures and Fundamental Films will each turn some of the stories into theatrical films.

Sun Hui thinks Cai is very different from the man he used to be. "Cai used to be terrible with words, and then one day something clicked. He can talk at length at public events now. Since he started running the company he's become much more professional, much more focused," Sun said. "Running a company really does sharpen a writer's follow-through — otherwise a writer's pace goes slack."

Cai has also thrown himself into Suspense World, a suspense-literature magazine. It began in print and later moved entirely to a digital edition. On Weibo it has close to a million followers. Suspense World also runs a website of the same name, and Cai wants that platform to gather suspense writers and readers in one place.

That means Haolin Culture will not be a one-writer company. Cai has pulled the "sole proprietors" of Chinese fiction together — an approach Guo Jingming had already shown works — signing more than 20 suspense writers, including Geshu Yi, Li Ximin, Zhou Haohui and Ning Hangyi, along with exclusive representation rights to their work. Most were already friends of his; some he had met over his years running the magazine. Haolin Culture can develop what they write into books, films, TV series, web series, stage plays and more.

Suspense writers have successful precedents to follow. Beyond their boss Cai and their elders Nanpai Sanshu and Tianxia Bachang, the novelist who writes as "A Piece of Candy," and who signed a personal representation deal with Haolin Culture last year, makes a persuasive case. She began writing in 2004 on the "Lotus Pod Ghost Tales" board of Tianya Club, and has published Rat Skin, Jade Beauty (《鼠皮玉人》), The Matrimony (《心中有鬼》), Hidden Motives (《心怀鬼胎》), Ghost Blossoms in March (《阴花三月》) and Poisoned Candy (《糖果有毒》). The film made from The Matrimony was released in 2007, and Fan Bingbing won Best Supporting Actress at that year's Golden Horse Awards for it.

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In 2015 Cai hired the professional manager Zhang Xin as the company's CEO, to run its affairs with him, while he kept writing suspense fiction. "Among the writers who made their names at the same time, Cai's output is on the high side — he has more than 20 novels published now, and he's still adding one or two a year. A Capricorn workaholic," Jin Maluo said.

Han Han and Guo Jingming, who came out of Shanghai at about the same time as Cai, no longer call themselves novelists. Narrow the comparison to the suspense writers who made their names alongside him: Li Ximin and Zhou Dedong, both born in the 1960s, are no longer very prolific; Zhou Haohui, born in 1977, is still at his peak. Encouraged by the market and by capital, he too has set up a studio of his own — The Dark Ones (《暗黑者》), the web series adapted from his novel Death Notice (《死亡通知单》), ran on Tencent Video to a good response.

On output and single-mindedness, the company Cai runs closely resembles the man. On the face of it, opening a company or a studio should be easier for Han Han and Guo Jingming, who have far more fans. When Han Han announced the app "ONE," advertisers came running, and the launch event for his company Tingdong Pictures played like a lively talk show. When Guo Jingming's Ice Fantasy (《幻城》) and L.O.R.D: Legend of Ravaging Dynasties (《爵迹》) started shooting, the noise was louder still.

Cai isn't worried about any of that. "A lot of today's pretty-boy writers turn out work that sits between fiction and essay, and the story isn't always strong. Suspense is made of story — a highly codified genre." Which is to say suspense sits naturally close to the screen. Suspense fiction may be drifting back toward family life and mainstream themes — Detective Chinatown (《唐人街探案》) plays more like a comedy, The Grave Robbers' Chronicles more like a big treasure-hunting adventure — but that is a good thing, and it shows how well producers can get these stories onto the screen.

Jin Maluo, founder of Dumi Culture, agrees. "Suspense stories are high-concept, easy to work with and have a big market, which makes them an important source of material for film and TV companies. Anything with suspense in it has an advantage."

The record bears him out: far more of Cai's novels have been adapted for the screen than those of his peers in youth literature, even if the impact hasn't matched. In 2007 The 19th Space, adapted from The 19th Level of Hell, was released, with Gillian Chung among the leads; in 2010 The Deserted Village Apartment was released, starring Shawn Yue and Zhang Yuqi; in 2015 Murder, Years Like Flowing Water wrapped filming, directed by Fruit Chan and starring Angelababy and Ethan Ruan, among others.

Other suspense writers have moved closer to film and TV as well. Nanpai Sanshu set up Nanpai Investment and chairs it, though the company invests only in adaptations of his own novels; this January Tianxia Bachang became a shareholder and chief content officer at Xiangshang Pictures, and has been starting up adaptations and productions of his books.

All of this is because film and TV companies are developing suspense films in bulk. Last year they came to Haolin Culture and commissioned the suspense writers gathered there to rewrite scripts. Over 2015, the screenwriting projects Haolin Culture signed and carried out included The House That Never Dies II (《京城 81 号Ⅱ》), The Night of Léon the Killer and Mathilda (《杀手李昂与玛蒂尔达的那一夜》), That Longest Night I (《最漫长的那一夜Ⅰ》), The 19th Level (《十九层》) and My Days at the Ministry of Punishments (《我在刑部的日子》). But this is not the core business Cai wants; he would rather keep the rights to the work inside the company — copyright, after all, is said to be the most valuable thing there is right now.

So the company has hired a small team of three or four people who do nothing but discuss and develop story IP. It has also formed its own production team, with the intention of taking part in film and TV investment and production. Haolin Culture now works with a number of film and TV companies, and most of what it signs with them are licensing agreements for film production, games and script adaptations.

On April 11 this year, Haolin Culture listed on the New Third Board; some promotional write-ups called it "the first writer's company in China to go public."

The label matters less than it sounds. The main benefits of a New Third Board listing are usually visibility and easier capital operations. According to the figures disclosed at listing, Haolin Culture's net profit for 2013, 2014 and January–July 2015 came to a loss of 734,900 yuan, then 284,000 yuan, then 1.4711 million yuan — a modest rise in profit as the roster of signed authors and the business have grown.

Platforms such as Qidian, Chuangshi and NetEase Cloud Reading are also competing hard with Cai's Suspense World — they have more fans and more traffic, and may hold greater appeal for suspense writers.

And if you think of Haolin Culture as a film-and-TV production and copyright-investment company, there are a great many more of those. Like its peers, this company — with its managers, its screenwriting team, its copyright team and its production team — faces the risks any company in that category runs: box office is hard to predict, and suspense stories are frequently subject to intervention and censorship.

Cai believes revenue will keep rising year by year, but he won't say much about the company's income outlook. He agreed to this interview on the occasion of his new book, That Longest Night 2 (《最漫长的那一夜 2》) — as a writer.

Cover image: a still from the 2015 film Murder, Years Like Flowing Water