I haven't done a Shanghai piece since the one on Eileen Chang. Cue, therefore, this 2018 work by Paul French, subtitled A Shanghai Noir.

French is the author of Midnight in Peking, which I very much enjoyed. He has the knack of making history read like a very gripping novel. OK, so it's a fairly sensational type of history that he deals with. Even so, not everyone can pull this off.

In fact, this is a book that I would have liked to listen to. The narrator would ideally have an American, gangster-flavoured drawl. As Jonathan Chatwin writes here: "A large part of the book’s joy is in its detail: the fashion, the drinks, the drugs, the cars, the bars, the slang. French writes in a present-tense heavy, hard-boiled prose which consciously alludes to the crime novels of James Ellroy, peppering his description and dialogue with the patois of the time."

A potential narrator would also have to be able to do lots of accents, in keeping with the linguistic and ethnic melange that was Shanghai in this period (late 1920s to early 1940s). On its streets, aside from a number of variants of Chinese, could be heard English, Yiddish, German, Russian, Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, Tagalog, Korean, and Japanese: "Shanghai between the world wars was a home to those with nowhere else to go and no one else to take them in... Shanghai became a city of reinvention."

At the book's heart are the entwined lives of two extraordinary entrepreneurs (that's a kind word, as both were into shady dealings, and inextricably caught up in Shanghai's rackets, but nevertheless, their impetus was entrepreneurial).

One is Joe Farren. Born in the Vienna ghetto as Josef Pollak, he started out as a dancer and chorus-line manager, and ended up fronting Farren's, the biggest, glitziest casino and entertainment venue in the area that becomes known as the "Badlands".

The other is Jack Riley, born Fahnie Albert Becker. Jack was an orphanage-escapee, ex-US Navy sailor, prison-escapee, and eventually the "Slots King of Shanghai". He even had his initials stamped on the tokens: ETR -- Edward Thomas (Jack) Riley, and as they could be redeemed all across town, he had "effectively created a new alternative currency in Shanghai". And from slots he graduated to roulette wheels.

But the major character in the story is Shanghai, and it reaches out to grab you on every page. 


The photos in this post were taken in Shanghai, 2016. On the left of this one is Broadway Mansions, one-time site of "high-stakes Russian card games"; later, with all foreigners expelled, it became the Japanese Army Liaison Office HQ

The city is multi-faceted. There are glitzy venues, with chorus lines, ballrooms, bands, and cocktails. And there are dives of every hue. There's a thriving dope trade (opium, heroin, cocaine, morphine, you name it...), not to mention the sex trade, and the illicit arms trade. There's gambling of every description -- at the dog tracks and boxing rings, at the slots and roulette tables. Unsurprisingly, there are rackets and mobsters; there are brawls and shoot-outs and murders. And there are law enforcement officers determined to bring all this to heel.

There's disease (we hear about cholera, typhoid, smallpox, and tuberculosis, as well as all manner of sexually transmitted ailments). There are beggars and refugees and suicides.


Originally the Great Northern Telegraph Company Building, this edifice now houses the Bangkok Bank

Life was always edgy in Shanghai, but August 1937 and "Bloody Saturday" mark a turning-point. Bombs fell on the city, killing thousands, including many of the refugees who had flocked to Shanghai to escape Japanese depredations in the hinterland.

Poverty, shortages, and spiralling inflation; horrendous death tolls (between Bloody Saturday and the end of 1937, at least 300,000 people, mostly Chinese, died, as a result either of wartime violence or of disease, cold, or starvation); ongoing aerial conflict to the north of the Settlement (clearly visible from the roof of the Cathay Hotel) -- you didn't have to be able to read the runes to see that things wouldn't be getting back to normal any time soon.

The Japanese are still not in the International Settlement or Frenchtown. But they control the Badlands, which becomes the city's main vice area.

Demand for places on evacuation ships is high. Many just want to get out.



But many simply can't: "Jack Riley, with his false name, [self-mutilated] fingertips, and a long-expired Chilean passport, cannot leave; Joe Farren has no desire to return to Nazi-controlled Jew-hating Vienna; Nellie, Nazedha, Sasha Vertinsky and all the rest of the White Russians fear Stalin's gulags even more than the Kempeitai. These men and women will stay come what may -- there are no visas for them, no refugee ships, no new homelands to welcome them." (Nellie, Joe's wife, eventually does get herself onto an evacuation ship. French has not been able to trace what became of her. And Vertinsky, a talented singer, does return to Russia, where he seems to enjoy Stalin's protection -- but that's another story for another time.)

The other side of the coin is opportunity. The Japanese reconfiguration of the geography of the city, and the resulting departure of the Chinese gangs who had held sway, together open up a vacuum that Farren and Riley are happy to fill: "Eternal outsiders both, they choose no-man's-land as their kingdom."

In September 1939 Britain becomes part of the war. Chongqing, Chiang Kai-shek's wartime capital, is bombed every night. "But in the midst of this, there's no alternative for Shanghai, no other option for Joe and Jack but to carry on: Farren's opens on the twenty-first with a Riley-backed casino upstairs and Joe's name in neon, shining out over the Great Western Road... Ignore the rest of the Badlands -- Farren's is bringing high-class Shanghai back for the first time since Bloody Saturday... Inside Farren's is a place to forget the war, the barbed-wire barricades, the check-points, the shakedowns, the inflation eroding your savings, the newsreels showing Europe going down in flames, the bar stool gossip that maybe that was the last evacuation ship and now your fate is entwined with Shanghai's, like it or not."


The China Merchants Bank Building dates back to 1897, and therefore ranks as one of the Bund's oldest European-style structures

The writing on the wall is twofold, however. First, the US law enforcement agencies are desperate to bring Riley to book, and (long story short) they eventually do. He's arrested, sentenced, and shipped off to the US to serve time for gambling offences in Shanghai, and to do the rest of the sentence that he'd skipped out on all those years ago.

(As Riley steps aboard the boat from Shanghai, he gives the US authorities some incriminating evidence about US marshal Sam Titlebaum. This character had been one of the main forces hot on Jack's heels, but it turns out he is not only implicated in bad stuff like black-market arms dealing, but actually isn't who he says he is. He ends up sentenced to serve time at the same prison as Jack...)

It seems like Jack has been defeated. But it turns out he has been lucky again. After serving his Shanghai sentence, he is transferred elsewhere to serve the rest of his time. But then, as part of the wartime amnesty that took effect in some states, he is granted a pardon, in August 1942, having served just 52 days of that sentence: "Lucky Jack once more. Fahnie Albert/John Becker/Jack Riley walked out of the gates and disappeared."

Doubtless he reinvented himself somewhere else. Double-check your great-grandfathers...

Second, time is moving inexorably on, and Joe is not so lucky. He'd stood out against paying the spiralling taxes levied by the Japanese (in control of the Badlands, remember). We're now in 1941: "By November, Farren's is the only major joint in the Badlands left open: an outpost of the desperate, the needy, and the lonely... Yet perhaps those inside Farren's were among the lucky. In the winter of 1941, the Shanghai Municipal Council collected twenty-nine thousand dead bodies from the streets of the International Settlement, Chinese and foreign."

In December, Japan attacked not only Pearl Harbor, but also Hong Kong, Manila, Singapore, and Shanghai. This is the period recorded by J.G. Ballard.

Joe is taken by the Japanese on 12 December. To exact revenge for his refusal to pay protection money, he is tortured. His friends succeed in extracting him on 15 December, but it's too late. He's either already dead, or he dies in the car. He is buried in an unmarked grave in Hungjao. You can't help having hoped for a better end...



So, it's a rollicking good read. But is it history? French acknowledges that the records are incomplete, and although he has done his utmost to stick to historical fact, "assumptions have been made". And as Gary Krist complains, "Since French includes no endnotes or even a list of sources, it’s impossible to know just where the facts end and the folklore begins."

There's an interesting discussion of this in an online interview that Andrew Field, himself a historian of Shanghai, conducts with the author. Field starts from the position that the book "is deeply rooted in the real history of the city’s nocturnal life as well as the myriad other aspects of the city’s history". But he also comments: "I couldn’t help but feel that you walk a thin line between the literary genres of historical fiction and literary non-fiction."

French responds: "You’re quite right, I do take some liberties. But here’s my defence! Firstly, I’m dealing with underworld characters, criminals (quite serious and nasty ones in some cases) and they work hard to obscure themselves... Secondly, these are massive stories with many characters but they have to be fitted into a coherent narrative, and 90,000 to 100,000 words... I always try to point out to the reader where I might have made a shortcut. However, I never totally invent anybody, anywhere or anything."


The AIA Building. Constructed in 1921, it used to house the North China Daily News, one of French's key sources

He also justifies his lack of detailed source notes: "Ultimately I felt City of Devils was too layered and the sources too multiple throughout to really be able to footnote it properly. Newspapers may tell one story, the Shanghai Municipal Police files another, the notations from the Shanghai intelligence service (Special Branch) another, memoirs yet another, a personal anecdote told to me once more gives a version. In the end the stories within City of Devils are multi-layered composites derived from so many sources."

OK, well, I suppose so... The academic in me still misses this paraphernalia, though...

Still, I enjoyed spending time with this book, and -- as is the way of these things -- it has spun off another list of books to read, and songs to listen to, and fascinating people to find out about. Seriously, life is too short.