Old Shanghai in Popular Fiction – Jack McColl on the Bubbling Well Road

David Downing is following his very good, and very successful, “Station” series of Berlin WW2 novels with a new series set just before WW1 featuring British spy and luxury car salesman Jack McColl. It seems it will be a kind of “Lanny Budd” type series following the old Upton Sinclair formula of inserting a character as a witness to real events.

And where should we first encounter McColl in the first book of the series – Jack of Spies? Why, old Shanghai fans you’ll be delighted to know we encounter him on the Bubbling Well Road in 1913. Well, not quite. First McColl appears in Tsingtau (Qingdao) in late 1913 doing a bit of spying on the German fleet and old Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee (later to go straight to the bottom of the South Atlantic in the Battle of the Falklands) and his German East Asian Squadron. Then he’s of to Shanghai and hops all over the Settlement and also enjoys an opium pipe in Frenchtown, as you do. A lot of fun and some nods to real events – Sidney ‘Ace of Spies’ Reilly was really in Port Arthur earlier and it was true that Special Branch were perpetually worried about the Indian community in Shanghai attempting to foster rebellion against the Raj in India from China. W could quibble with a few small things – qipao’s split to the hip in 1913 are a tad unlikely, but still it’s all good page turning fun. After Shanghai, McColl heads of to San Francisco but here’s hoping he one day makes it back to the Bubbling Well Road. He might well do later – in San Francisco our hero bumps into a young Agnes Smedley in a Mexican restaurant back in the days when contraception and Indian independence were her thing before she set of for China.