 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 " . 
