On the ‘Badlands’ of 1930s Peking, He Builds a City of Mystery and Crime | Interviews

“Crime stories are like lifting the lid off a city and looking inside — the things nobody notices, and the things a halo has hidden, are all laid out flat. In front of a dead body, no one can stay silent.”

The sky is going dark, and another day's walk is about to start. Setting off from the Zhonggu Hotel by the East Second Ring Road, a group of tourists turns and plunges into the depths of Kuijiachang Hutong — Armour Factory Alley. The route runs east to west, about two kilometers as the crow flies, but with all the twists and turns of the hutongs it takes three or four hours to walk.

Nine in ten of the walkers are foreigners, and this is not ordinary sightseeing. The route follows a famous murder from old Peking. In 1937, the body of Pamela, adopted daughter of the former British diplomat E.T.C. Werner, was found at the corner watchtower by Dongbianmen. Her face had been mutilated, her chest cut open, and her heart was gone.

From Armour Factory Alley to the watchtower, then along the foot of the city wall into what was once the “Badlands” — the term comes from America, another name for a red-light district — this small patch of hutongs was, before the Japanese invasion, a no-man's-land in practice, policed by nobody. Its narrow, crooked lanes were packed with bars, gambling houses, and brothels, a gathering place for foreigners who had fled their own countries and for men on the make, and a short walk from the Legation Quarter for soldiers looking for pleasure.

Every stop along the route is a place tied to the murder or the investigation. The walk ends at Dongjiaominxiang, the old Legation Quarter, today the seat of the Beijing municipal government. Tourists hurry past its gate while Paul French, microphone in hand, talks the group through the case; staff project period maps, news reports, and old photographs onto the wall, and passersby stop to look.

The walk grew out of a true-crime book called Midnight in Peking. Published in 2011, it was a hit — it reached The New York Times bestseller list and won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime and the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction. This year Social Sciences Academic Press brought out the Chinese edition as part of its Oracle Bones series; besides the narrative itself there is a second volume, ‘Badlands’: Peking's Fallen Paradise, which sets out the history of the Badlands.

The book's author is Paul French. French lived in Shanghai for more than 20 years and works as a China analyst and commentator; his other books include a history of North Korea, a biography of the Shanghai adman and adventurer Carl Crow, and a short history of foreign correspondents in China. He once published academic work as a researcher with Hong Kong University Press, but soon found he wanted to reach ordinary readers with something more approachable — “and, you know, pretty much everyone in the world likes a bit of detective mystery.”

Before he became an author he worked for a while in marketing and advertising, writing in his spare time as a hobby — “though marketing and advertising are really storytelling too.” The success of Midnight in Peking made him a full-time writer, and he went on to publish City of Devils, Destination Shanghai, and other books.

Werner the diplomat and Pamela were both real people, and French's books are not fiction based on history but nonfiction built on fact. The crime-story structure gives them the elements of a traditional mystery, but the material he weaves together comes from period documents, police reports, newspaper accounts, and letters. Much of the book reconstructs daily life in Peking on the eve of the Second World War, above all the Badlands that few people know about, and it carries many old photographs, maps, and clippings from the papers of the day.

French spent long stretches in Shanghai's Xujiahui Library reading Republican-era papers and records. Shanghai was an international city then, and it published a great deal in foreign languages. When Pamela was murdered, the lurid story ran on front pages everywhere, and even turned up in some Australian and American papers — which is how French first became interested in the case.

On his book program Eight Minutes of Reading《开卷八分钟》, Liang Wendao introduced Midnight in Peking this way: “Why does an unsolved case like this deserve our attention again, deserve to be written into a book, deserve to be translated into Chinese and introduced to Chinese readers? Because, as the great sinologist Jonathan Spence said, this book is by no means simply a reconstruction of an ordinary detective case — it is also a social history.”

In the brief stateless interval between the Xi'an Incident and the Japanese occupation, a tangle of overlapping jurisdictions created a protected space for foreigners. The Legation Quarter was a copy of Europe, with a cathedral, department stores, and photo studios. The same arrangement also produced the Badlands, which nobody governed, where jobless foreigners drifted about, sick, moving between cheap hotels and bars. Shanghai by then was the world's fourth-largest city after London, remarkably mixed and busy, with large numbers of Russian and Jewish immigrants pouring in; arrivals did not even have to show identity papers.

The murder took place with the Japanese threat closing in. Pamela was killed in January; by July came the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. “Peking in 1937 had three million people, of whom maybe a thousand or so were foreigners, and most people had genuinely never met one… If a 19-year-old white girl, whose father was an important British diplomat regarded as an ‘old friend’ of China, could be killed in such a horrible way, what chance did the Chinese themselves have of surviving?”

Peking was on edge. War and revolution filled everyone in the city, Chinese and foreign alike, with unease and fear. People told French that at the time the case read as a metaphor for the war already under way, and that Pamela's murder stood for an assault on everyone in China.

His list of books makes his fascination with history and crime plain. He was born in Britain, where detective fiction is a thriving culture, and grew up steeped in that reading — the novelist Graham Greene, among others — which showed him how to build a big story out of real events.

What draws him to mystery and crime is not only the plotting that keeps a reader tense. “Crime stories are like lifting the lid off a city and looking inside — the things nobody notices, and the things a halo has hidden, are all laid out flat. In front of a dead body, no one can stay silent.”

“People's memories of things seventy or eighty years ago tend to be hazy, but if a classmate of yours was murdered, you'd remember it.” Trying to reconstruct the society of the time, French found residents who had been schoolchildren then.

“Some of them remembered at once — ‘oh, Pamela.’ Others were too young, but they remembered their parents discussing it at the dinner table. They also remembered a superstitious rumor going around that Pamela was a fox spirit that had been beaten to death. You can feel how something like this works on a small, close-knit community.”

Murders happen every day, and one that goes unsolved keeps a whole society on edge. “Nobody writes these things down as history, but they're part of city life too — we just don't tend to talk about them.” That goes double for China, which always projects a picture of being “very safe.” “Whereas if you watch British television, you'd think it was the most dangerous country in the world.”

The tour format brings to mind Hong Kong's murder-scene tour, “Twenty Thousand Ways to Die in Yau Ma Tei”, which walks people through the sites of 12 murders committed in Yau Ma Tei between 2012 and 2016 and uses them to draw attention to a range of livelihood problems in Hong Kong. The two ideas overlap. The founder of the Yau Ma Tei tour once said: “There's a lot of shadow behind our glitter, but most people don't want to look at it.”

French walks into the dark parts of history in the same way. What interests him is the foreign community in China during one very specific period.

Midnight in Peking tells the Pamela case of 1937. His next book, City of Devils, is set in 1930s Shanghai, in a brief ownerless period when criminal gangs of every kind rose to power. The book after that runs from the end of the war in 1946 to the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, and follows how stateless Russians and Jews weighed and fought over their chances to leave or stay.

His great-grandfather served with the Royal Navy in Shanghai, which gave him a mental link to China. In his words, what he cares about is “the people who came before me”: soldiers, missionaries, sinologists, outlaws at the end of their rope, people running from the times. It is usually the respectable ones — diplomats, professors — who get formally recorded, but the so-called “low element” existed among the foreigners too, and together they built an age of great complexity, glamour and darkness side by side.

That age stopped short in 1949, wiped away along with countless puzzles and unsolved cases. French treats his own work as a kind of history writing, and believes there is a point in giving an unsolved case an ending, because “we've lost what you'd call collective memory — even foreigners have forgotten that foreigners lived on this land before them… and only by understanding the chaos of the past can you understand China today.”

Below is an edited excerpt of QDaily's conversation with Paul French:

Q = QDaily

A = Paul French

Q: When you first read Pamela's story, what was your impression of it, and why did you think it was an important story worth telling?

A: First, it's a good story on every level. It gathers all the elements — Peking, detective work, murder — a story that works for an audience anywhere in the world. Some of my earlier books were done with Hong Kong University Press, a lot of very academic material on narrow topics, and afterwards I felt I didn't want to write another history book about China, because for most readers those are hard going. If I could find a story that was genuinely good and also true, people would be drawn in on their own, and by the end they'd know a bit more about this city's history — even if many of them don't notice that, and read it as a detective novel.

And the setting is unusual: it sits under a Japanese threat that had already come very close. Readers know what history followed, that these were the last days of old China, so what was people's state of mind in a period like that? Everyone had to make a decision, to go or to stay, and all sorts of things shaped those decisions. The direction of history was already set, but I wanted people to know the personal stories inside it.

People told me they saw it as a metaphor for the war that was coming — they knew it was near, because Japan had already set up Manchukuo. If a 19-year-old white girl, whose father was an important British diplomat regarded as an “old friend” of China, could be killed in such a horrible way, what chance did the Chinese themselves have of surviving?

Q: In that era, what drew foreigners to China, and what were their lives like?

A: The reasons varied. Some were soldiers, diplomats, and businessmen sent here. Some came because they were interested in Chinese culture, language, and history. And plenty came because in 1936, if you traveled from London to China and said your name was John Smith rather than Paul French, nobody could prove you were lying, right?

So what I mean is, you could hide here very comfortably. My other book, City of Devils, is about exactly that — criminals wanted at home came to Shanghai and turned into local gang bosses. That community was complicated and wild, nothing like as simple as many people imagine. After Pearl Harbor in 1941, when the Japanese invaded, you started to see some truly desperate people. Back in 1937 there were about 25,000 Russians in Shanghai who had fled Communist Russia, plus large numbers of displaced European Jews. They had no work and no money, and some of them quickly became partners in crime.

Q: How do you see the role this criminal element played in the city's overall power structure?

A: First, many foreigners then, the British above all, carried themselves very high. They felt they came from the most important empire on earth, the most civilized and the most powerful, and that everything should be done their way. But turn the next corner and there were these same white people gathered together shooting drugs, smoking opium, or selling themselves on the street, and white women selling sex to Chinese men — which embarrassed the foreigners in the city who had power and standing. It was also the place where the border between two supposedly separate, independent communities blurred. Foreign dealers traded drugs with Chinese, and you saw mixed relationships everywhere. Even entertainment: if you wanted to hear jazz in Shanghai then, bars like these were the only place you could hear it.

Q: Your writing is almost all crime — murder, gangs. Where does the pull of that subject come from?

A: There's no society on earth genuinely without gangs. One day I read an article about North Korean history saying that however strong its government, North Korea still has gangs — it has never shaken off organized crime. What they do may change; now, for instance, they may work more online than on the street. But every society has them: Italy has the Mafia, China has the triads, Britain has street gangs and so on. That's what makes criminal life so fascinating — part of it is about making money, and part of it is a culture.

The difficulty of researching it draws me in too. If you're writing about a British ambassador to China, most of the material really isn't hard to check; records are everywhere. But the stories of thugs and criminals are rarely written down, obviously because this isn't something people boast about. Nobody writes these things down as history, but they're part of city life too — we just don't tend to talk about them.

That's especially so in Chinese society, whereas the West has always been fond of crime television and crime fiction. If you watch British television you'd think it was the most dangerous country in the world, but that's only a genre and a style. I think the Chinese government may worry about the country's image. Think about it, though: a city as big as Beijing can't have no murders at all.

And people everywhere are always interested in crime — Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, that sort of thing. Once a murder happens, people want to know everything about it. Where did it happen? Who was the person with at the time? Some scandal may get exposed — someone wasn't at home but at a hotel with a lover. In English we call that a skeleton in the closet. That's what I find interesting about a murder case: for any community, any small town, or here, the foreign community in Peking, it works like a periscope. You can't hide anything, and you can't refuse to take part.

In front of a dead body, no one can stay silent. I think that's why people like writing about crime, or reading about it — you get to dive deep into a community, above all into the parts people try to hide, and the face of crime is often what shows a city's real face, with the mask off.

In almost every history of foreigners in Beijing, the story is about diplomats or famous businessmen. The foreign community here always tried to present itself to the outside world as very successful, rich, and civilized. But I'm talking about another group of foreigners, forgotten ones: addicts, prostitutes, criminals, and people who looked respectable and weren't. That's what's interesting about writing crime — you get to look at the non-elite, at people at the bottom.

Q: Compared with much literary work, you seem to put far more effort into finding and organizing sources, even collecting oral history yourself. Do you see your own work as a kind of historical document?

A: Yes, or at least I hope so. This book and the two after it, along with some lighter work built around them, have become reference material for a lot of people interested in this particular period of China's history. And only by understanding the chaos of the past can you understand China today.

You can't understand a nationalism like China's today unless you know how divided and fragmented this country once was. After the war Shanghai never became the international city it had been. The war washed everything away, and the people and things that had been so active vanished when it ended. But their influence carried on, and became part of people's identity now. Take Shenzhen: everyone's status there is equal, because nobody was there thirty years ago, they all came from somewhere else. Give it another thirty or fifty years and I think you'll see a real Shenzhen identity appear, distinct from every other city.

It's like the name of my blog, “China Rhyming” — history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes — and that's how I see many things happening in China. But people tend to forget the past. Ask a young person how the Second Ring Road came about and many don't know it follows the line of the old city wall.

I was going through some old posters recently and saw that in 1933 there was already a bike-rental service where you could rent at one shop and return at another, much like today's bike sharing. There was also a Coca-Cola advertisement from 1927. People always say Coca-Cola has been in China thirty or forty years, but it arrived much earlier than that. It's just that between 1927–1949 and roughly the 1980s there's a gap. That gap is what cost us our so-called collective memory and left us confused about a lot of things — even all the foreigners forgot that foreigners had lived on this land before them, forgot the ways people used to deal and do business with the Chinese.

Cover image: the Tartar City, what foreigners called Peking's inner city; the vertical banner image is Pamela. Source: Social Sciences Academic Press