Fiction Writing
Woon won a consolation prize for a short story called The Body in Question which he submitted for the 1985 National Short Story Writing Competition. In 2002, he published his first novel, The Advocate's Devil. This was followed three years later by The Devil to Pay (2005). Both books are crime novels set in 1930s Singapore with Dennis Chiang, an English-educated Peranakan lawyer, as the protagonist. Woon has said that fiction writing was "something I did on the side when I got tired of writing non-fiction". A reviewer of The Advocate's Devil commented: "That the author is a lawyer first and promising novelist second is most glaring in the language used in Devil. ... This must be the first made-in-Singapore whodunnit that needs to be read with a dictionary at hand." Although the protagonist Chiang's "view of human beings other than himself is patronising at best" and might leave readers with a "rather sour aftertaste", the novel's "light touches of romance and compassion do much to lift the storyline" and had "masterful pacing".
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