Paul French (1)Recensioni

Quite a bit of shock value throughout. I don't buy his conclusions, but enjoyed the read

Well written and interesting. A compelling read. I admire the author's dedication to telling this story and his efforts at research to do such a fine job. The way he put the story together makes it read like a murder mystery, not just a retelling of the facts.½

Detailed look at crime in Shanghai during the 1930-1940's. Drugs, gambling , murder, prostitution and more. Focusing on the rise and fall of Jack Riley and Joe Farren. Well written.

Really fascinating book, equal parts history and true crime. The author vividly evokes a pungent atmosphere of multicultural pre-war Peking with terse, hardboiled, film noir-esque language. The murder mystery was never officially solved, but the conclusion drawn seems plausible. This won awards; I don;t have a problem with that. Really well written.

Initially thought this was a novel, then a couple of chapters into the book realized that it was historical nonfiction. As they say, truth is often stranger (and more riveting) than fiction.

In late 1930s Beijing, the teenage daughter of a British colonial officer was brutally murdered, her body horrifically mutilated and discarded, a death horrific enough to make headlines even amid the fraught climate of a city on the verge of invasion by Japanese imperial forces. Paul French works hard to give this work of true crime the suspense and immediacy of a thriller novel, and the empathy he shows for the murder victim—Pamela Werner, just 19—is welcome. I'm glad that he doesn't lose sight of the tragedy of her death.

However, the fact that Werner's murder was (at least officially) unsolved, and that both the formal investigation and public interest in it petered out comparatively quickly means that Midnight in Peking loses momentum after about the halfway point. I'm also not sure that French convinced me that the Werner murder really does tell us all that much about 1930s Beijing, particularly since the sources he's working with are largely written from a European colonialist perspective. And while it's entirely possible that the men whom French names here as her killers were indeed culpable, it should be noted that questions have been raised about the integrity with which he presents some of the evidence he draws on.

(I get the difficulties in trying to parse the identities of historical figures in contemporary terms, especially when dealing with a very fragmentary sourcebase, but I was very uncomfortable with the fact that French chose to repeatedly refer to one person as a "hermaphrodite.")½

Good Read, Lots of Atmosphere, Not Much Meat

"Midnight in Peking" is a decent read. The book is very atmospheric. Almost all of the research regarding the murder comes from the father of the victim's notes. The author seems to have done a lot of other research that was unnecessary, such as describing weather conditions, irrelevant biographies of other "characters," and tangential political events happening at the time of the murder. This book easily could be whittled down to a nice article. The author deserves tremendous credit for keeping the myriad of characters readable: whenever he brings up a minor character for a second or third time, he adds a quick tag to remind the reader what that character did previously.

I think I approached this book with the impression that I would learn more about Beijing at the time. This expectation was not met, so I was a little disappointed. Although I tended not to like some of the digressions, I did enjoy reading about Beijing's odd mix of foreigners before the war.

Impeccable Details, Odd Language

Paul French's "Midnight in Peking" was a wonderfully-written, well-researched book that looked at Westerners living in Beijing in 1937. It mostly used China and Chinese people as a prop to tell the true story of a murder. "City of Devils" is quite similar, although this book looks at two Western gangsters in Shanghai.

On the plus side, the research seems incredible. As with most true crime, minor details are added such as what characters were thinking and descriptions of their personal surroundings. This makes the book historical fiction, according to some professional reviewers. French uses geographic details to good effect.

Unfortunately, the James Cagney-esque slang used on literally every page is laughable. This Hollywood version of gangsters culture is more funny than it is serious, and that greatly detracts from the narrative. Perhaps this gossipy language was borrowed from his English language sources, but what the intended effect is, I don't know.

The slang coupled with the Western-centric focus made brought this book down tremendously.

A fascinating recount of a gruesome crime in old Peking.

A curious and interesting book. It's actually fiction, though it appears to be based quite heavily on real events of inter-war Shanghai, with real people. The book contains a number of seemingly authentic newspaper clippings and the like. The principal characters are a European Jew who develops a sparkling nightclub, complete with dancers, and a tough American, an escaped ex-con, who becomes, for a brief time, king of the slots in Shanghai. Needless to say, it doesn't end well for many characters, and that's even before the Japanese get involved. Recommended for sheer atmosphere.

Passionnant et effrayant, donné

ARC review. I found the historic details of this book very interesting. I don't know much about Peking/Beijing in any period - honestly, I still don't feel I know much, since so much of the story is based on English records of the murder at the center of the story. (French does a good job of acknowledging, even pointing up the colonial bias, but that doesn't eliminate it. Worse, the main Chinese character proves duplicitous/unknowable towards the end of the book - reinforcing the image of the impenetrable East.) But I was hooked regardless, sucked into the world of the book for a full day, and I came out wanting to learn more about the place and period.

Anyone who has lived in Shanghai and become interested in its history is faced with the challenge of translating the old street names from the International Settlement and French Concession into today's street names. Now that we have the Internet, this is a lot easier, of course, as there are enough websites about old Shanghai to keep you occupied for days at a time. Still, if you are walking around, it is good to have a book like this at your fingertips. The author, Paul French, tells you a little (sometimes VERY little) about the street and perhaps some of the things that used to be there. For someone without a deep interest in Shanghai, this book will be meaningless. It is not a narrative. Other than an introduction about the history of Shanghai streets, it consists of two indexes - past names to present names, and present names to past names. Then the individual streets are discussed in alphabetical order, first in the International Settlement, then the French Concession, then in the External Roads area to the West of Shanghai (the site of much of the activity in French's brilliant recent book, City of Devils.) The book includes lots of pictures, many of which are referenced in the text, but some that, frustratingly, are not. it also includes a lot of interesting old ads from Shanghai restaurants and other businesses. These are fascinating if you love Shanghai. Still, it can't provide pictures of every interesting building it mentions, so you'll find yourself putting the book down often to find a picture on the Internet of, for instance, one of the fascinating art deco apartment buildings in Shanghai.

Despite its compelling nature to a Shanghai-phile, however, the book is still a bit frustrating. For something so nicely put together--excellent paper, even a red ribbon bookmark--it is marred by ridiculous editing mistakes, such as the use of who's instead of whose and it's instead of its. The writing is also disappointing given the heights French reaches in City of Devils. It is not necessary to tell us that Hong Kong Road is "obviously named after the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong." "Obviously" is obviously overused in this book. Also, while some of the entries tell us about the Shanghai street in question, others veer off and tell us only things about the place it was named for, which isn't much help if you are standing there trying to think about what the streetscape might have been 100 years ago. In some cases, I'm sure this is all French could come up with. Perhaps I'm being too nit-picky. At some point, in retirement I suppose, I'm going to spend two or three months walking up and down every street in the former foreign parts of Shanghai, and this book will certainly be by my side.

I have read a lot of books about Shanghai since I first lived there in 1989, and this is one of the two best (along with Georges Spunt's A Place in Time). French takes us to pre-WW2 Shanghai and gives us a ringside seat as it begins to disintegrate under the pressure of drugs, crime, and then--far worse--the Japanese invasion of China. But of course, Shanghai has always been, and still is, about money. And there was money to be made by the bucketful if you didn't mind putting aside morals--not that those were a popular thing in Shanghai. The story centers on two men, Jack Riley, and Joe Farren, both of whom had little choice but to make it in Shanghai if they were going to make it anywhere. Riley had been an American sailor in the Far East and knocked about its cities, including Shanghai, which was the biggest and baddest of the lot. After returning stateside and ending up in an Oklahoma prison for a 25-year stretch, he managed to walk away after two years, and under his new name of Riley, found his way back to Shanghai where he worked himself up to being the king of the city's slot machines, raking in thousands of dollars nightly. There was no way he was going back to America.

Farren's background was less shady. He was a dancer, who with his partner and wife, Nelly, became the toast of Shanghai, leading to his creation of one string of dancing beauties (mostly White Russian refugees) after another. Eventually, he became the owner of night clubs, but the real money there was in gambling, and that is where his partnership with Riley was born. And because Farren was Jewish, and his Austrian homeland became part of Hitler's Germany, he had no place to go either. So even as bombs fell on Shanghai and thousands died violently or froze to death in the streets, even as those with places to go boarded ships and steamed down the Huangpu to safety, Riley and Farren and a host of others stayed on, still looking to make a buck, even if more and more of what they made had to be paid to the Japanese secret police or in other forms of "taxes".

There are many other memorable characters, including a mysterious American marshal, a crime-busting federal Elliot Ness-wannabe, and club owners of all nationalities. Through French's vivid writing, we come to know them all. Some are more benign than others--but everyone has an angle that involves making money. The forces of the law are a bit overmatched.

Amazingly, French writes most of the book in first person, and it works brilliantly. It is the most immediate story about those days in Shanghai I have ever read. Details about some of the events and personalities involved are missing, and he freely admits to filling in the gaps, so the book, despite a lack of dialogue, reads more like a novel--one of the best ones you have ever read.

My caveat is that if you haven't read about the history of Shanghai, or perhaps even had the good fortune to live there, a lot of this will just seem confusing and chaotic. While French sketches in some of the background info, this is not a scholarly work of history. Rather, it is a total immersion in a time and place that was perhaps unique. I simply can't imagine it being done any better than French does it here. At times when reading this, I would just set it down for a second and marvel that not only was it one of the best books about Shanghai; it was simply one of the best books I had ever read. That judgment still holds.

The long epilogue tries to tie up a few loose ends, but given who these characters were, that is a futile task in many cases. The book also includes a cross-reference of the old names of Shanghai streets in the days of the International Settlement and the French Concession with their modern-day names, which will be of interest to those who know Shanghai.

This is simply a brilliant achievement. Please give it a try.

It's the 1930s and 40s and Jack Riley and “Dapper” Joe Farren are big players in Shanghai's seedy underworld. American Jack Riley escaped prison and came to Shanghai and now runs a gambling empire. “Dapper” Joe Farren, originally from Vienna, finds his way to Shanghai with dancing and romantic partner, Nellie, and eventually rules the nightclubs. But it's hard to remain on top especially when you live a life of crime and people are looking to bring you down.

So while the book certainly focused on the two men, it was also a nice little history of Shanghai during the 1930s and 1940s. I much preferred the first half of the book which was about Jack and Joe's rise to power rather than the other half which was more about their downfall. There were quite a few people to keep track of and I wish the author would have included a reference page for that instead of a glossary of terms. Overall, while the story of Jack and Joe with the backdrop of Shangahi is interesting, I wouldn't say it is must read unless you are specifically interested in nonfiction from this time period and location.

I won a free copy of this book in a giveaway but was under no obligation to post a review. All views expressed are my honest opinion.

Wow! Do not pick this book up until you have a solid stretch of time in which to NOT sleep and NOT go to work. This amazing story hooked me with the lurid murder, but kept my attention by describing the intricate political world of pre-WW II Peking on the eve of its destruction. My heart can't help but feel that the father of the murder victim, being a scholar, knew exactly what he was doing when he recorded his private investigations through official channels. The scholar Werner did not find justice in his lifetime, but--thanks to the efforts of Paul French--at least the story is published for a wider sense of rightness. The best thing I've read all year.

Just finished reading "Midnight in Peking: How the murder of a young Englishwoman haunted the last days of old China" by Paul French. This is non-fiction and takes place in 1937 when a 19 year old English woman is found murdered and mutilated in Peking. The murder was investigated by a British detective and a Chinese detective. Peking is surrounded by the Japanese. The murder isn't solved although the woman's father takes up the cause and appears to have come up with the right solution but the war prevented anything from happening

Midnight in Peking. How the murder of a young Englishwoman haunted the last days of Old China and The badlands. Decadent playground of Old Peking are two closely related books, authored by Paul French, the editor of the in-house publication series of the Royal Asiatic Society. The badlands. Decadent playground of Old Peking is a small booklet that describes the seedy area of gambling houses, cabarets, brothels and opium dens directly to the east of the Legation Quarter in Beijing during the 1920s -- 1930s. This area is the setting of the drama in Midnight in Peking. How the murder of a young Englishwoman haunted the last days of Old China.

For a long time, foreigners had the position, almost as untouchables, but also in a sense of neglect. The Chinese mainly tend to see the foreign presence as a pollution, and tend to ignore it as well as they can. During the late years of the Qing dynasty diplomats lived in the Legation Quarter, and a relatively small number of foreigners lived in other parts of the city, notably George Ernest Morrison who lived in Wangfujing Street, then called Morrison Street, Sir Edmund Backhouse and Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston, tutor of Puyi. These people were sinologists and newspapermen. A more colourful riff-raff of Russians and other foreigners resided in the seedy quarter known as the badlands north of the Hadamen Gate. It was in this area that the young Pamela Werner, daughter of a sinologist and diplomat, looked for adventure and met with a gruesome death.

Midnight in Peking. How the murder of a young Englishwoman haunted the last days of Old China describes the events and points at the most likely culprit at whose hands Pamela met with her death. It is a chilling story, which French pieced together from the archive of Pamela's father and circumstantial other evidence. The book is written in the style of a detective story, but still sufficiently factual to pass as a hybrid between scholarly work and popular science.

All the traditional elements of a great murder mystery are here: exotic locale in 1930s Peking, West vs East, a dead young woman who was a bit of a rebel, corrupt or ineffective police, cover-ups, an obsessive father, seamy underbelly of Peking populated by thugs, slimy rich guys, pimps and working girls. A story that could easily have been shifted overseas and written up as fiction by Ian Rankin. ARC from Penguin via Goodreads giveaway.

I've read good things about Paul French's books and looked forward to reading this one - a true story of the murder of a young woman in Peking in 1935, the bungled official police investigation and how her determined father finally solved the crime. This story has everything: sex, drugs, alcohol,corrupt politicians and decadent colonial residents, so it should have been a rip-roaring read. Yet somehow it wasn't.

French has investigated all the facts, but he tells his story in a clinical passionless manner that I never truly got caught up in what should have been a truly riveting story. Maybe this should story would have been better done in the hands of Erik Larsen.

This Edgar Award-winning book is an utterly compelling and very disturbing account of the 1937 murder of Pamela Werner, set against the foreboding backdrop of Peking on the cusp of monumental change. Pamela's murder was particularly gruesome, and a tricky thing to investigate: she was an English girl, which required the involvement of the British legation, yet the crime was committed outside the Legation Quarter, which made it within Chinese jurisdiction. The diplomatic maneuvering made investigation very difficult, as did nationalistic face-saving on all sides. The interactions of so many groups of people in a relatively small area: legations of wealthy British, American, French, German, Spanish, and Dutch; along with Japanese military and the unease they brought (justifiably, considering the full-scale Japanese assault and occupation of China later that year); desperately impoverished and stateless White Russian exiled from Bolshevik Russia; and the nearby Badlands -- den of opium, heroin, prostitution and other vice -- made this an area of volatility and subterfuge. No one was what they seemed on the surface: not Pamela, not her father, not her friends, not the investigators, no one.

This is a great, if disturbing read. The depth of research is astonishing, yet the book reads like a thriller. The author's skill is impressive, but more impressive is the body of research collected at the time by one key player, especially given the condition and confusion of China in the late 1930s. This is fascinating true history.

French pieces together the events of a murder that scandalized Peking on the brink of a full Japanese invasion. Pamela Werner was days away from turning twenty when her body was found at the base of the Fox Tower. Her father, a disgraced and eccentric British man, looked to the joint investigation of Chinese and British officials to bring justice to his only child's death. However, those officials are undermined by various governments and internal political issues and no conclusion was reached. Her heart-broken father continued his own investigation, even after the Japanese took over the city.

French created a masterful work. Not only does he recreate Pamela as a bright young lady who simply wanted to go skating with friends, but he also makes Peking a character in its own right. It was a city devastated several times over through the 19th century, and then on the verge of new turmoil, the international quarter continued its decadent ways. It was refuge for White Russians and European Jews and so many struggling Chinese from the countryside. Japanese soldiers and spies were already in the city, though they had not formally occupied it. Everyone knew that was coming. Pamela's death occurred at a terrible time--as if there is any choice time to be murdered--and would have been utterly forgotten if not for French's book. I can see why this won the Edgar Award.

Despite my own conceit that I possess a fairly broad understanding of international politics and geography, the truth is that like most Americans I know next to nothing about North Korea, a bitter enemy of the United States for more than sixty years and perhaps the final remaining domino of the Cold War era. Thus, I was pleased when North Korea: State of Paranoia by Paul French came to me through an early reviewers program. (Note: the copy I read is actually a pre-publication edition of uncorrected page proofs.)
Paul French is a British author of books of Chinese and North Korean history, and is considered a leading expert on North Korea. I am not familiar with his previous works, but North Korea: State of Paranoia reads much like a highly-detailed government report, albeit an extremely well-written one, focused almost entirely on the economic history of North Korea, which is essentially an account of decline and descent to economic collapse and ruin. His thesis argues that it is this failed economy that has defined North Korea’s relationships with friends and foes alike throughout its existence and in the contemporary world serves as the pivot point for its nuclear brinksmanship. I feel that it is definitely the quality of the prose that carries the book, for the overwhelming amount of data presented by French in the course of more than four hundred pages would otherwise be a terrible burden for all but the most dedicated students of the topic.
French neatly traces the history of North Korea under its multigenerational dynasty of the three Kim’s, its unique guiding ideology known as “Juche” – an unlikely and sometimes conflicting blend of Marxist-Leninism, Maoism and Confucianism – and its stubborn adherence to an economic model unwaveringly devoted to a planned, centralized economy that yet has never paid dividends to a nation ever on the brink of widespread famine and disaster. It is also a history of Cold War alliances with the USSR and the People’s Republic of China, and hostility to the United States and South Korea -- the other half of a divided nation that it once tried to conquer and absorb in the Korean War that brought the Americans and Mao’s China in on opposite sides. The USSR is now a memory, China has gone capitalist, South Korea is an Asian economic giant, but some six decades after that conflict went from hot to mostly cold, rifles still point warily at one another across the no man’s land of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and North Korea recklessly and inconsistently rattles a nuclear saber under the nervous glare of the United States, which still has thousands of American boots on the ground on one side of the DMZ. The failed economy, tenaciously clinging to a long obsolete planned socialist model, remains according to French the core of North Korean woes and the key to understanding its isolation, its rigidly closed society, its paranoia and its advertised nuclear threat.
The author reveals that not only do few outsiders know more than a very little about the almost inaccessible nation, the North Koreans themselves have been sequestered from the world for so long that they have nothing to juxtapose against their own bleak hardscrabble existence. French makes the point that whereas the economically disadvantaged and politically controlled citizens of the former USSR and the eastern European socialist republics could clearly glean that life was far better and freer in the West, the average North Korean has scant exposure to anything beyond the closed borders of their pariah nation.
We learn also from French that North Korea has been, at least since the uneasy truce that brought the Korean War to its close, largely an afterthought in American foreign policy characterized by benign neglect at best -- that has only loomed large briefly from time to time as one of the various dysfunctional Kim’s has surfaced to threaten open hostilities to various neighbors. As famine and the chronic brink of absolute collapse of the state into mass starvation has become the status quo, North Korea has learned that the only way to successfully engage the international community is through an ever-lengthening shadow of belligerence that essentially results in a temporary backing off in exchange for food relief from the outside. The reader is reminded of a dog who only gets fed if he bares his teeth. Amazingly, this strategy has continued to bear fruit – pun fully intended – through a string of administrations in Washington, although there were some attempts at longer-range engagement during the Clinton years that offered certain unrealized potential. It should surprise no one that as bad as things were in the North Korean-American relationship, it was the Bush Administration’s tactless approach that derailed whatever hoped-for agreements had lurked tenuously on the horizon. George W. Bush and his team of incompetents – who could hardly carry a cup of coffee across a carpet without spilling it – in another uninspired celebration of the boneheaded, provoked the North Koreans, by branding them as one of the hyperbolic “axis of evil” triad, to abandon their inflammatory rhetoric and actually detonate a nuclear weapon, in response to which the resolute Bush team did … well … nothing. Under Obama, it seems that our current foreign policy is to ignore Kim3, so the more things change the more they stay the same. It is a bit disappointing that French does not devote more time to the contemporary political climate and to address that detonation of a bomb as a certain game-changer, but perhaps because it has failed to manifest itself as such in international politics he feels it unworthy of special attention. In this, I am not sure that I agree.
French’s analysis does make clear that there are really very few options available to policymakers. Kim’s habit of holding the international community hostage with nuclear threats in order to obtain food for a near-starving population seems ludicrous on the face of it, but it is not entirely irrational. I recall reading of British anger in World War I at the American sponsored program led by the young Herbert Hoover to feed the famished in occupied Belgium; the Brits noted coldly but accurately that this benefited the German belligerents, as well. While right-wingers can decry propping up a hostile regime with food, would it serve anyone’s interests if the mass-starvation of millions of people was allowed to come to pass – especially because that regime is both paranoid and nuclear-armed, and therefore potentially unstable?
As noted earlier, this book reads very much like an institutional report, so it is pregnant in details. Conspicuous in its absence is any human element to the narrative. There is a little bit more than a biographical sketch of the first Kim -- Kim il-sung, the founder of this bizarre nation -- but beyond that it is difficult to get a feel for the North Korean people, the elite or the peasantry. It is an isolated society, to be sure, but there have been refugees and defectors, so it should have been possible to add real people to the plot. What is not lacking throughout the book are acronyms -- hundreds of acronyms -- of agencies, organizations, and the like, which underscores that sense of reading a report. Perhaps these acronyms are essential to this type of study, but I found at least some of these superfluous and could not help feeling that French delighted a bit too much in their use. Fortunately, a convenient alphabetical index of translated acronyms is included at the front of the book, but there are after all far too many to memorize and even a handy key such as this cannot help but disrupt the narrative flow.
Certain shortcomings aside, French is to be credited as a fine writer whose narrative is never permitted to turn dull even though it contains all of the ingredients of the potentially ponderous. As I turned the final pages, I was pleased that I had read it and would definitely recommend it. I owe a debt to French: because of his reasoned analysis I now feel capable to form opinions and hold an intelligent conversation about North Korea with some sense of confidence.

An informative and quite comprehensive look at North Korea from its foundation through to the present day. The most engrossing part of the book for me was the beginning, when French describes (as best as anyone outside of North Korea can) what daily life looks like for North Koreans. Food scarcity is common, apartments on the top floors of buildings are unpopular because the unreliable electricity supply means that elevators frequently don't work, and for all the government's virulent eschewing of Western capitalism, there are North Korean pop groups. The rest of the book then goes on to detail the country's internal political workings, and what a potential regional powder keg it is. However the regime eventually collapses, it will only be bad news for the countries surrounding it.

While North Korea: State of Paranoia could benefit from some further editing to remove some rather repetitive elements, I think it's well worth a read, particularly in light of the recent spate of idiocy surrounding the movie The Interview. As French so ably shows here, the appalling cruelty with which the North Korean regime treats its people should argue against it or Kim Jong Eun being treated as buffoonish and ineffectual figures of fun. They are worthy of mockery, yes, but not of blithe dismissal.½

Great beginning and end, very slow and boring middle part of this book. My favorite part were the photographs at the end.