Review | Sin city: book exposes gritty underbelly of 1930s Shanghai
The chancers, adventurers and criminals who made and lost fortunes in China treaty port teetering on the edge of chaos
City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir
by Paul French
Penguin Books
In the uncertain days of Shanghai in the 1930s and early 40s, with Japanese forces getting ever closer and the future of the foreign enclave and its inhabitants in doubt, there was a great deal of money to be made in drink, drugs, gambling and other vices. It was a crazy time for the city and its residents, “like living on the rim of a volcano”, American journalist J.B. Powell wrote.
Based on the true lives of some of the many larger-than-life characters who lived in the city during that era, City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir, by Paul French, brings interwar Shanghai to life in a gritty work of narrative non-fiction.
By the 30s, Shanghai had grown from a walled fishing village into an international treaty port and the world’s fifth largest city, “a deafening babel of tongues, a hodgepodge of administrations, home to hopeful souls from several dozen nations joined together by one simple guiding ethos: money and the getting of it”, French writes.
French’s fascination with this period of Chinese history and the foreigners who were present is apparent in City of Devils, as well as in his back catalogue, which includes books on legendary 30s Shanghai advertising pioneer Carl Crow, the badlands of Beijing and, in Midnight in Peking (2011), the unsolved murder of a young British woman in Beijing in 1937. The latter reached The New York Times’ bestsellers list and is being adapted for television.
