RAS Shanghai Book Club – Midnight in Peking – Last Chance to RSVP for Monday 16th January
Posted: January 13th, 2012 | No Comments »RAS BOOK CLUB
Monday 16th of January, 2012 at 6.00pm
The PuLi Hotel and Spa
1 ChangDe Road, JingAn District, Shanghai
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The RAS Book Club will meet to discuss Midnight in Peking; the author, Paul French, will participate in the conversation with a group of people that has read the book. This will give the members of the book club an opportunity not only to discuss the writing, motivations, literary experience, evolution of this work of literary non fiction but also to dialogue about the ‘who done it factor’ something that has not been included in Paul’s previous presentations on this work.
Entrance: RMB 70.00 (RAS members) and RMB 100.00 (non-members) including a drink (tea, coffee, soft drink, glass of wine) Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to this RAS Book Club event. Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at these events.
RSVP: bookclub@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn
RSVP ESSENTIAL AS ATTENDANCE IS LIMITED. PREFERENTIAL BOOKING TO MEMBERS UNTIL 10TH JANUARY, 2012.
N.B. FOR RAS MEMBERS AND THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE READ MIDNIGHT IN PEKING, ARRANGEMENTS ARE IN PLACE TO PROVIDE AN EARLY AND LATE SESSION, SHOULD THIS EVENT BE OVERSUBSCRIBED BY RAS MEMBERS.
MORE ABOUT MIDNIGHT IN PEKING
In 1937, Peking was a city with a healthy appetite for privilege and scandal. Lavish cocktail bars and dingy opium dens abound; corruption, superstition and rumours were par for the course. The exclusive Legation Quarter thrived on gossip, and almost nothing was too shocking for its foreign residents. Meanwhile, Japanese troops had already moved into Manchuria and were poised to move on Peking. The people of the city nervously waited for the axe to fall with parties and drinking and drugs, frantically living out the last days of their indulgent Peking lifestyles.
Ever on edge and with tension peaking, the discovery, one freezing January morning, of a brutally murdered young Englishwoman traumatized the people of Peking. Pamela Werner’s body was found, horrifically mutilated, at the foot of the Fox Tower, an ancient watch tower supposedly haunted by fox spirits. The police investigation that ensued was one of confusion and surprise but not one of answers. A private investigation conducted by Pamela’s father proved more productive but still brought no justice.
When author Paul French came across the story by chance, he was so haunted by a photograph of Pamela that he decided to investigate the circumstances surrounding her unsolved murder. The enquiry took him back to a city full of vice and intrigue where he met a perplexed Chinese police force,a determined ex-Scotland Yard detective and a British Foreign Office more interested in saving face than revealing the truth. He tracked Pamela’s killer through the infamous Peking ‘Badlands’ rife with crime, prostitution and drugs and into the grand foreign Legation Quarter where supposed gentlemen were not so gentle and in doing so he uncovered the truth.
Almost seventy-five years after the murder of Pamela Werner, Paul French finally gives the case the resolution it was denied at the time and in the tradition of the true crime classics White Mischief and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Midnight in Peking transforms a headline gripping murder into an absorbing and emotional exposé, bringing the last days of old Peking to life.
Paul French studied history, economics and Mandarin in London and has an M. Phil in economics from the University of Glasgow. He is now based in Shanghai as a business advisor and analyst. He is the author of four works of Asian History including Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand and Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from the Opium Wars to Mao and wrote the foreword to Penguin’s Shanghai: A History in Photographs 1842-Today.
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