A limited period special offer on the e-book edition of my book City of Devils (here on Amazon.co.uk and here on Amazon US). So if you fancy some 1930s Shanghai gangsters, louche nightclubs & cabarets, fixed dog racing, questionable boxing tournaments, random murders, bent cops & loads of drug running you’re in luck….
1930s Shanghai could give Chicago a run for its money. In the years before the Japanese invaded, the city was a haven for outlaws from all over the world: a place where pasts could be forgotten, fascism and communism outrun, names invented, fortunes made – and lost.
‘Lucky’ Jack Riley was the most notorious of those outlaws. An ex-Navy boxing champion, he escaped from prison in the States, spotted a craze for gambling and rose to become the Slot King of Shanghai. Ruler of the clubs in that day was ‘Dapper’ Joe Farren – a Jewish boy who fled Vienna’s ghetto with a dream of dance halls. His chorus lines rivalled Ziegfeld’s and his name was in lights above the city’s biggest casino.
In 1940 they bestrode the Shanghai Badlands like kings, while all around the Solitary Island was poverty, starvation and genocide. They thought they ruled Shanghai; but the city had other ideas. This is the story of their rise to power, their downfall, and the trail of destruction they left in their wake. Shanghai was their playground for a flickering few years, a city where for a fleeting moment even the wildest dreams seemed possible.
In the vein of true crime books whose real brilliance is the recreation of a time and place, this is an impeccably researched narrative non-fiction told with superb energy and brio, as if James Ellroy had stumbled into a Shanghai cathouse.
My author Q&A column this month for the China-Britain Business Council’s Focus magazine…. on Kerry Brown’s new book The Great Reversal. Click here to read…
In The Great Reversal, Brown’s intention is to provide British readers with our own China story and an understanding of how and why the West, through Britain, impacted and shaped the east in the form of China. Here Paul French caught up with Kerry Brown to talk Anglo-Chinese relations, the issue of our collective China knowledge (or lack of it) and what we can do about it.
Headed up to Edinburgh to help William Dalrymple launch his new book The Golden Road – I would urge China (and Japan, Korea, SE Asia people) to get a copy and read as it’s an important book about the shaping of the East Asian era in the classical period. We certainly all had fun talking about it…. and if you’d like to watch William’s presentation and the conversation you can online at the Edinburgh International Book Festival site on a ‘pay what you can’ basis – click here
Here a photo of the Russian Monument, taken in 1910, to the Russians killed in the Boxer Rebellion (1900) in Tientsin (Tianjin). After 1917 the Russian’s renounced their extraterritorial rights to a concession in the city.
Now up for pre-order, the UK edition of my next book, Her Lotus Year: China, The Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson (Elliot & Thompson) – out in November….. click here for amazon and Bookstore.org here
Earlier this year I wrote a piece for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine on the artists Anna Hotchkis and Mary Mulikin. Hotchkis trained in her native Edinburgh, worked in China in the 30s and is perhaps most associated with the artists’ colony at Kirkcudbright in Scotland. Since publishing that article (click to read here) I’ve come across another Hotchkis painting I didn’t know – this one of Hong Kong…
