This coming Saturday (June 21, 2025 – 2pm), it’s the City of Devils tour with Historic Shanghai….
Based on my book City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir, you’ll be taken on a walk through the places and traces of the wild and wonderful story of Jack Riley, Joe Farren, and interwar, underworld Shanghai.
To get you in the proper frame of mind, here‘s Historic Shanghai’s 2020 interview with me on City of Devils, all about gangsters, Old Shanghai’s soundscape, rumor and gossip, and reading recs.
Wow! Some people take on big projects!! A World History Encyclopedia!! And here’s my interview with them…. here (and if you can’t find time to read, there’s an audio link too….
The Open House Festival takes place throughout August in Bangor, near Belfast, Northern Ireland.
More than just a festival… It’s a month long music and arts festival in August and the vintage-themed Seaside Revival Festival on Bangor seafront but we also recently opened our very own multi-purpose venue, The Court House. In addition, we promote one-off shows in Belfast on a year round basis and as we are an independent non-profit arts charity, any surplus generated from these events is used towards our community projects.
I’ll be talking Wallis in China on August 9th (click here for details and tickets) at the beautiful Court House in Bangor (below)…
Mark O’Neill will talk about his book ‘Liang Sicheng – The Guardian of China’s Architectural History’. Liang Sicheng ( 梁思成) was the Father of Architecture in China. During the 1930s and 1940s, he and his wife travelled to more than 200 counties in the interior and found 2,738 ancient buildings. The two discovered the richness and diversity of China’s architectural heritage and, through their books and drawings, made them available to the world, both Chinese and non-Chinese.
Photographer Heinz von Perckhammer, Peking, 1928, Published by Albertus-Verlag GmbH of Berlin with a foreword by Arthur Holitscher (Hungarian playwright, novelist, essayist and travel writer)….
Baseball writer and historian Gary Cieradkowski has fleshed out the story of Roy Counts, who was the other imprisoned baseball player who escaped from prison in America with Jack Riley (from my book City of Devils) – Riley of course headed off to Shanghai, Counts went in a different direction… click here…
