The Magic of Macao & Pulp Fiction – Sid Fleischman’s Look Behind You, Lady (1950)

Posted: October 23rd, 2023 | No Comments »

I was asked to write a bi-monthly column for Macau Closer magazine in Macao on representations of the enclave in popular culture. Here’s the first one on 1950s Macao and The Pulp Fiction of Sid Fleischman in “Look Behind You, Lady”

By Paul French

Sid Fleischman loved Macao. He once wrote, ‘there’s not much paradise left in the Orient, but there’s always Macao.’

Admittedly Fleischman arrived in Macao after a rough stint in Asia. He was with the US Navy in World War II serving in the Philippines before landing in Shanghai shortly after the Japanese surrender. Rounding up on-the-run Japanese torturers in the once legendary, but now rather depressed, “Paris of the East”, was a tough beat.

Then he was posted to Hong Kong, where he found the Brits a little pompous, and decided to take a ferry to Macao. It became a regular haunt. Fleischman came to know Macao well and decided that ‘If you can’t enjoy yourself in Macao there’s something wrong with you – not Macao.’

Out of the Navy and back in California, Fleischman didn’t have many useful civilian skills. But he could do magic tricks, in fact he was obsessed with magic. And he couldn’t get Asia out his head.

He bought a Royal portable typewriter and wrote a novel about Shanghai (“Shanghai Flame”, 1951). A publisher bought it. It was good, but no more than pulp fiction – quickly churned out, fast-paced stories featuring wise-cracking tough guys and beautiful dames invariably in exotic settings.

“Shanghai Flame” did well. The publisher asked for another – ‘stick with the Orient Sid, the readers dig it. Write what you know.’ And so he thought back to those lazy weekends in Macao, sipping vinho e licores watching sojourning Hong Kong bachelors dancing with Eurasian hostesses to a Filipino band at the Bela Vista Hotel. He put his two interests together – Macao and magic. The result was “Look Behind You, Lady” (1952).

The mix worked. The public loved the book, loved the setting. Macao, ‘hanging like a necklace of simulated diamonds and paste rubies off the neck of Hong Kong’ and a broke American magician, Bruce Flemish, who knows every trick except how to win in a casino. Flemish is performing magic shows – after the Chinese acrobats, before the Greek stripper – at the Hotel China Seas (a thinly-veiled version of the Central Hotel on Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro). Two floors of gambling, a bordello, several floors of suites, and opium on the room service menu.

Flemish is broke. He’s offered a way to make some money. It’s not exactly kosher, but when you’re down to your last few patacas, what you gonna do? And this is pulp fiction, a genre with rules that Sid Fleischman had quickly mastered. His Macao has a Macanese casino boss with no thumbs (his wife was late paying the ransom to some pirate kidnappers), a dapper, but thuggish American gangster, a “White” Russian émigré indulging in a little casual espionage, and a ‘dame’ – invariably an American one, a long way from home, “lost in the East”, in some sort of trouble and, of course, completely irresistible. And in Fleischman’s Donna Chandler we get a classic pulp fiction dame – you shouldn’t fall in love with her, but you can’t stop yourself, even though she’s trouble with a capital T.

The plot meanders through some gold smuggling, spy shenanigans, a bunch of counterfeit dollars. There’s a little gunplay, a garrotting, a fair bit of lovey-dovey action, before a magic trick or two save Flemish’s hide. Pulp fiction isn’t heavy on the moralising, though if you’re looking for a life lesson from Fleischman then the best you’ll get is the tip that when a gangster gives you a fat roll of Hong Kong dollars to give to another gangster, don’t go and gamble it in a casino!

“Look Behind You, Lady” isn’t the best novel about Macao ever written… but it is fun. And Fleischman did know of what he wrote. The atmosphere is heavily redolent of Macao in the early 1950s. Not quite a historical document, but not to be totally dismissed either.

Sid Fleischman kept on writing… and kept on doing magic. He made a decent career combining the two. He returned to Shanghai for his biggest hit –a novel set in the old French Concession’s knock-down-and-drag-out bar strip, Blood Alley (1955). John Wayne bought the rights, made a movie, and Sid was set up for life with Hollywood.

“Look Behind You, Lady” might have made a good movie too – Bogart and Bacall as Flemish and Chandler? They’re not a mile away from Bob Mitchum and Jane Russell whose movie Macao came out the same year. Perhaps that’s why we never got a movie version of “Look Behind You, Lady” – Josef von Sternberg got there first and Hollywood wasn’t going to do two Macao movies in the same year. But we still have the novel and Sid Fleischman’s Macao.

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