All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Click here for a recording of my Christmas reading for RTHK3’s Morning Brew in Hong Kong – an abridged version of my chapter in Destination Peking (Blacksmith Books) of the chapter on Denton Welch’s life in Shanghai and his 1932 Christmas in Peking’s Legation Quarter.
My pesonal favourites, in no particular order….
Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China – Scott Seligman (Potomac Books) – the Semyon Kaspé kidnapping and murder in 1930s Harbin has long deserved a detailed telling – White Russian fascists, collabos, crims, spooks and commies all come together in one of the great, often now overlooked, cosmopolitan cities of northern China.
Shanghai Demimondaine From Sex Worker To Society Matron – Nick Hordern (Earnshaw Books) – occasionally a book comes along that breaks new ground. Who knew Emily Hahn’s Miss Jill had a real inspiration? More flesh on the bones of old Shanghai.
Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future – Ian Johnson (Allen Lane) – History is invariably the first and last battleground for repressive regimes and the fight for control is real and nasty. Recovering those that seek to truthfully record their country’s past is important stuff.
Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution – Tania Branigan (WW Norton) – and so too with Red Memory, the most powerful and beautifully written of the recent and ongoing crop of Cultural Revolution books.
Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong – Vaudine England (Corsair) – cometh the hour, cometh the book – there could not be a better time for a new history of Hong Kong that gets us away from a litany of governors and officials and gives the city back to its multicultural roots.
Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food – Fuchsia Dunlop (Particular Books) – a wonderfully meandering and charming study of Chinese cuisine thankfully (for us non-cooks) recipe free to make us feel bad about eating out all the time.
Bernadine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China – Susan Blumberg-Kasson (Post Hill Press) – the first Shanghai focussed biography of the super well-connected Bernadine Szold-Fritz, arts patron, salon host, social maven.
Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China – James Zimmerman (PublicAffairs) – like Semyon Kaspé we also needed a full-length study of the Lincheng Outrage and the sensational cast of characters involved.
The Race to the Future: The Adventure That Accelerated the Twentieth Century – Kassia St Clair (John Murray) – a highly readable account of one of the most bonkers events ever – the 1907 Peking-Paris Car Race – and additional meditations on the coming of the modern to China and the world in the form of the combustion engine, petrol, the telegraph etc.
Chinese Dreams in Romantic England: The Life and Times of Thomas Manning – Edward Weech (University of Manchester Press) – A great study (based largely on Manning’s correspondence) of one of England’s first China scholars. To say it was tricky to get to China and learn Chinese in the early 1800s would be the understatement of the century.
Brian E Walter’s new assessment of the British and Commonwealth contribution to the defeat of Japan in the Pacific…
The monumental struggle fought against Imperial Japan in the Asia/Pacific theater during World War II is primarily viewed as an American affair. While the United States did play a dominant role, the British and Commonwealth forces also made major contributions – on land, at sea and in the air – eventually involving over a million men and vast armadas of ships and aircraft. It was a difficult and often desperate conflict fought against a skilled and ruthless enemy that initially saw the British suffer the worst series of defeats ever to befall their armed forces. Still, the British persevered and slowly turned the tables on their Japanese antagonists. Fighting over an immense area that stretched from India in the west to the Solomon Islands in the east and Australia in the south to the waters off Japan in the north, British and Commonwealth forces eventually scored a string of stirring victories that avenged their earlier defeats and helped facilitate the demise of the Japanese Empire.
Often overlooked by history, this substantial war effort is fully explored in Forgotten War. Meticulously researched, the book provides a complete, balanced and detailed account of the role that British and Commonwealth forces played on land, sea and in the air during this crucial struggle. It also provides unique analysis regarding the effectiveness and relevance of this collective effort and the contributions it made to the overall Allied victory.
My favourites, in no particular order…
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life – Anna Funder (Penguin)
Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era – Laurence Learner (Hodder & Stoughton)
Cinema Speculation – Quentin Tarantino (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience and Family Secrets – Burkhard Bilger (William Collins)
A Waiter in Paris – Edward Chisholm (Monoray)
A History of Water: Being an Account of a Murder, an Epic and Two Visions of Global History – Edward Wilson-Lee – (William Collins)
The Half Known Life: Finding Paradise in a Divided World – Pico Iyer (Bloomsbury Circus)
Life Sentence: The Brief and Tragic Career of Baltimore’s Deadliest Gang Leader – Mrk Bowden – (Grove Press)
Kiki Man-Ray: Art, Love and Rivalry in 1920s Paris – Mark Braude (Two Roads)
The World According to Joan Didion – Evelyn McDonnell (Fourth Estate)
My favourites, no particular order…
Interesting perhaps that even as the Hong Kong authorities continue their philistine (& i think unpopular) war against the city’s neon the longest article i’ve seen generally offering an alternative was bizarrely in last Friday’s China Daily
My favourites – in no particular order….
The Detective up Late (Sean Duffy #7) – Adrian Mckinty (Blackstone) – brilliant supposed final chapter in the Duffy series sees our hero awake blurrily into 1980s Ulster.
The Last King of California – Jordan Harper (Simon & Schuster) – a fever dream of a wild ride into the world of meth-fuelled minor crims in Nowhere, California
Heat 2 – Michael Mann & Meg Gardiner (HarperCollins) – rewatch the movie first then read Heat 2, a terrific prequal and a sequel.
The Enchanters – James Ellroy (Penguin) – dare we say Ellroy back on form trashing celeb culture, back in the alt-history of old LA and muckraking US history.
Independence Square (Arkady Renko #10) – Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster) – time moves on though Renko ages slowly but finely like good Georgian brandy. This time Renko heads to Ukraine and finds Putin pulling dangerous strings.
City of Dreams – Don Winslow (HarperCollins) – Book #2 in the Danny Ryan doesn’t kick like the first (City on Fire) largely due to moving out of Providence. The final part of the trilogy is out in 2024 so we’ll see if it ultimately rivals his masterful Cartel trio.
Age of Vice – Deepti Kapoor (Fleet) – a big sprawling wonder of a book that trawls through the underbelly of Indian crime and corruption.
The Secret Hours – Mick Herron (Baskerville) – Sorry, but I’m not a fan of the Slow Horses books but Herron’s standalones are invariably great, and this is one of them.
Code of the Hills (Mick Hardin #3) – Chris Offutt (No Exit Press) – Offutt is consistently a force to be reckoned with in Grit Noir and the Mick Hardin series is consistently quality.
The Murders of Moises Ville – Javier Sinay (Restless Books) – the only true crime on the list and a fascinating one from Argentina, where Sinay is a prolific true crime writer.
Paradise (DS Walker #2) – Patricia Wolf (Embla Books) – the bets new procedural series to come along in a while. Ranging from the Outback to the Gold Coast, bikie gangs and all manner of Australian crims.
All the Sinners Bleed – SA Cosby (Headline) – Cosby remains on a tear…
The Second Murderer – Denise Mina (Harvill Secker) – the best of the Marlowe reboots so far. Mina is totally pitch perfect as an heir to Chandler.
Malibu Burning (Sharpe & Walker #1) – Lee Goldberg (Thomas & Mercer) – Another good new series, fire investigators in Cali. Goldberg is good at the page turning thing.
The Wheel of Doll (Happy Doll #2) – Jonathan Ames (Pushkin Vertigo) – nice fast paced thrillers in contemporary LA that keep you page turning.
Needless Alley – Natalie Marlow (Baskerville) – 1930s Birmingham (with not a Peaky Blinder in sight) with dollops of sleaze, murder and period feel. A first novel and an author to watch.
The Lock Up (Quirke #9) – John Banville (Hanover Square Press) – Quirke steps back up after the last couple of somewhat lacklustre outings. Back to 1950s Dublin.
Moscow Exile (Joe Wilderness #9) – John Lawton (Grove Press) – Lawton’s mash up of real and fictional espionage continues the British obsession with the Cambridge spies.
The Darker the Night – Martin Patience (Polygon) – a good solid first outing for Patience in a twisty tale set around the Scottish Independence referendum.
The Partisan – Patrick Worrall (Bantam) – impressive first book from Worrall with a multi-track tale ranging from Moscow to London to Lithuania and elsewhere of the fall outs from the Holocaust and the Cold War. A new spy writer to watch.
From last years South China Weekend Post weekend magazine – Christmas Eve 1929 & Shanghai Municipal Police DCI John Creighton finds himself investigating a murder on the Shanghai Express stranded in a snowdrift….
Heads Up – This weekends South China Morning Post magazine Christmas edition sees DCI Creighton return – it’s a year later, a snowy Christmas Eve 1930, & he stumbles on a murder at a party in one of Shanghai’s smartest art-deco apartment buildings…. check out scmp.com this coming weekend
