Maurice Dekobra’s Macao, L’enfer du jeu

Having posted yesterday about Jean Delannoy’s movie Macao, L’enfer du jeu, I thought it worth going back for a quick post on the original 1938 book that inspired the movie, Maurice Dekobra’s Macao, L’enfer du jeu. Dekobra was seen as a somewhat subversive writer in France in the interwar period, though was widely read and regularly a bestseller – indeed “dekobraism” was used to describe the use of journalist style narrative in novels at the time (though is now almost totally forgotten sadly). He did travel in Asia to Japan and China both before the war and after. His English and German were both excellent and, during the First World War, he was sent by France to be a liaison with, first the Indian Army, and then the United States forces. Dekobra decamped to America during the war rather than stay in France under the German occupation. He returned afterwards and wrote mystery novels, several set in China as well as a couple of travelogues of his journeys (of which more in a later post).

Dekobra

An early edition of Macao, L’enfer du jeu

A later paperback

A scene from the movie version