Alexander Cordell’s The Bright Cantonese, 1967 – Red Guards in Hong Kong

Alexander Cordell is now best remembered for his series of books about the industrialisation of Wales, Rape of the Fair Country probably being the best remembered of his Welsh novels. But The Bright Cantonese, retitled The Deadly Eurasian for some subsequent editions and published by Victor Gollancz in 1967, is the story of Mei Kayling, a half-British, half-Chinese member of the Red Guard who is, in fact, a secret agent. It’s a product of its time following a heroic Red Guard trying to thwart a nuclear attack on China by the USA.

Though noted mostly for his Welsh writing, Cordell spent much of his youth in the Far East, particularly in Hong Kong, and had been born in Ceylon. He died in 1997 and his obituary in The Independent carried a good line, “Alexander Cordell was a popular writer whose novels were read by people who do not usually read novels.” He wrote two other novels located in China – The Sinews of Love (1965), which is set in Hong Kong, and The Dream and the Destiny (1975), about the Long March of Mao Tse-tung.