Ma Wei Slope by Keith West (1944)

I’d never heard of this book – Ma Wei Slope (Macmillan: 1944) – a palace intrigue novel set in the Tang Dynasty by Keith West. The detective novel features a rather drunken Li Po (Li Bo, the poet), palace girl Winter Cherry, her lover Ah Lai, and rows between the emperor and farmers. It got broadly good reviews in 1944 and this copy below is a later republication by Penguin in their trademark cover. I’m afraid I know nothing of the author, Keith West – one newspaper declared ‘he knows China…’, but quite how Iam not aware?

Until Andrew West (no relation) sent me the following:

“Keith West, the Oxford trained schoolmaster, who travelled extensively in the Yunnan and South China regions and whose hobbies have been collecting Chinese bronzes and embroideries” (China Monthly vol. 6, 1944, p. 30)