Travelling over the river to Battersea Power Station and the new Battersea Bookshop was also fun… and as part of Women in Translation Month. A great evening was had talking about Tie Ning’s My Sister’s Red Shirt (Sinoist Books) with Annelise Finegan, Academic Director & Clinical Associate Professor of Translation at NYU School of Professional Studies….
And a trip across to Northern Ireland and Bangor, near Belfast, for the Open House Festival was one of the most chilled and relaxed weekends at a festival for a long time….
As a past contributor to The Shanghai Literary Review it’s very annoying to read of the problems they are having with their institutional partners Duke Kunshan University’s Humanities Research Center (HRC)…. Read the details here and let’s hope Duke Kunshan sort this out….
(as of publication – September 1 – this matter has not been resolved leaving the people who give up their time to run TSLR considerably out of pocket and the future of the journal in some doubt – a shabby effort by Duke Kunshan all round).
As of last weekend TSLR confirmed that Duke Kunshan had still not responded to any correspondence on why they had failed to pay the promised monies. TSLR said: ‘Failing DKU coming to their senses, it appears that we’ll have to pay for the material that has been printed already (but cannot be used) as well as a reprint of the entire issue (thousands of dollars in total).’
You can help TSLR by donating a small amount to help them stay afloat here…
An interview (not under caution I hasten to add!…) with former Hong Kong detective Toby Bull who presents a series called China Noir. We discuss my books Midnight in Peking and City of Devils, the different approaches to crime and law enforcement in old Peking, Shanghai and Hong Kong… and whether Macao’s historic reputation as a crime and sin city is deserved or not…. click here to watch…
Film historian Xin Peng and Anna May Wong biographer are all involved in this terrific season running from early September for a month at the BFI on the Southbank….there’s a lot of movies, some old TV and talks – here’s all the details
My thanks to the great China ephemera collector Roy Delbyck for sending me this great photo of “Lucky” Jack Riley, the Slots King of Shanghai arriving in San Francisco for transfer to McNeil Island Penitentiary – if you’ve read my book City of Devilsyou’ll know all about Jack, what he got up to in Shanghai, and how come he ended up being transported back to the USA to jail – if you haven’t, then you should!
Anyway, as well as Jack looking dapper as ever there are a few other points of interest about the photo…
With him is Shanghai Municipal Police Sergeant George Athelstan Day – who accompanied him across the Pacific in a first class cabin and may have been selected for the job as he was going on leave to his native Canada anyway. Probably a good gig as Riley was legendarily fun and interesting company. This long leave meant Day was outside China on Pearl Harbor and so escaped internment in Shanghai. However, he returned to Asia to serve with Special Operations Executive (SOE) in India in World War Two. (my thanks to Professor Robert Bickers of Bristol Uni for the info on Sergeant Day).
I loved Bede Scott’s novel Too Far From Antibes (Penguin Books Southeast Asia) when it first came out (and reviewed it here in the South China Morning Post). I’m delighted to have blurbed this superb new edition of this retro noiry tale of 1950s Saigon reminiscent of Green, Ambler and Simenon.
It is 1951, and Jean-Luc Guéry has arrived in Indochina to investigate the murder of his brother, Olivier, whose body was found floating in a tributary of the Saigon River. As an avid reader of detective fiction, Guéry is well aware of how such investigations should proceed, but it is not immediately clear that he is capable of putting this knowledge into practice. In addition to being a reporter for an obscure provincial newspaper, he is also a failed writer, an incorrigible alcoholic, and a compulsive gambler who has already squandered a fortune in the casinos of the Côte d’Azur. Despite his dissolute tendencies, however, and his aversion to physical danger, Guéry does eventually manage to solve the case. In order to do so, he is obliged to enter a world of elaborate conspiracies, clandestine intelligence operations, and organized crime – only to discover, in the novel’s final pages, that the truth behind his brother’s murder is far stranger than he could have imagined.
I’m obviously fascinated with old photographs of China, but also (perhaps a little more weirdly) the albums they were often contained in. Just put ‘albums’ in my blog’s search engine and you’ll see many past examples. However, this one is special. This album of Peking photos was sold by the amazing Camera Craft Co, circa 1915. Camera Craft was run by American John David Zumbrun with premises on Legation Street (Dongjiaomin). Zumbrun (below) was very early, ahead (I think) oif other famous Peking photo studios, notably Hartung’s.
