Mickey Hahn and Miss Jill

It’s been a while since I read Emily “Mickey” Hahn’s story of sin and salvation in the brothels of the wartime Orient (mostly in Shanghai) Miss Jill (originally published 1947). Jill doesn’t stand a chance – a drunk Aussie mum, taken in and lured to Shanghai by a dodgy Japanese count, sold into the bordello of Madame Antoinette on the Tibet Road (Xizang Road now but not a stone’s throw from the old “Line” of bordellos on Kiangse Road/Jiangxi Road). She then meets a good looking American journalist. It’s not a great book (in fact to be fair Mickey Hahn never wrote a great book – but most were fair enough) and it doesn’t have the touch of a Somerset Maugham or a Graham Greene, either of whom would have plumbed the depths of the characters psyches more ably than Hahn and would have rendered a better Shanghai too. Though from a technical point Hahn knew her Shanghai and renders it well here. There are those Shanghailanders and China Hands who worship the ground Hahn walked on – I’m not one of them; I like her of course, probably would have fancied her something rotten had I been knocking around in Shanghai at the time but, apart from her excellent New Yorker pieces, her output was fair-to-middling at best to be honest.

Still, here’s a cover of an edition of Miss Jill I picked up recently – a mass market paperback from America’s Avon put out in 1950. “A Beautiful Girl’s Story of SAlvation and Sin in the Orient” and, on the back, Miss Hahn herself, “Of all the cities of the world, it (Shanghai) is the town for me.” Indeed so….