Claude Farrere’s Black Opium

As we’ve been talking opium dens – one last opium related post for a while. Thanks to the friend that passed me along an old copy of Claude Farrere’s 1929 novel Black Opium – ‘The Shocking Ecstasy of the Forbidden’. The book was originally published in French as Fumee d’Opium in 1904. Black Opium was only Farrere’s second novel but he went on to write other sensationalist books including La Bataille, about a doomed lover affair between Mitsuoko,a mysterious Japanese woman, and an English army officer. He’s been out of favour for ages now.

The jacket blurb on this edition from the late 1950s was enough to make it a bestseller again – “Follow the narrator through a smoke-hazed vision of opium dens in the Orient, cat-fights among the cream of New Orleans Creole society, and the nightmare corridors of his own private hell, soaked in the juice of the poppy…”