Paul French is a widely published business analyst and commentator on China as well as a historian. Born in London and a graduate of the University of Glasgow, he now resides in Shanghai.
Tell us about how you became involved with telling the story of Pamela Werner.
I came across a small footnote briefly telling the story of Pamela's murder in 1937--that it was terrible, that it happened on the eve of the Japanese invasion of China, that a Chinese and a British detective worked together, that it lifted the lid on a hornet's nest of scandals in the European community of the city and that it was never solved. I decided to dig around and see what I could find out. Pretty early on, I saw a picture of Pamela in an old 1930s newspaper, taken just weeks before her murder. From that point on, I knew I was going to have to try and find out what had happened to her.
What were the challenges of sticking to the facts while making Midnight in Peking a page-turner?
The first draft of the book was a straight work of nonfiction. But the characters didn't come alive, the Peking of 1937 with its seething scandals, tensions and fears didn't come across. I decided to go back and try and use the style of a literary detective novel. It's tricky because you want to maintain the pace and remain rigorous in your research.
Tell us about your research process.
It began with the easy stuff--dig out the old Chinese newspapers from the time, see if there were any memoirs from those days, any reports from the police and the diplomatic service. I also got lucky in that, despite being back before the Second World War, I found half a dozen people who had known Pamela and remembered the murder. Once everyone has died, then the gossip dies, too, and that's a really important dimension to include. I was also very fortunate that in London I stumbled across the papers and evidence Pamela's father had assembled after the Japanese occupied Peking, after the official police investigation was halted.
How much did your travels in modern-day China inform your portrait of historic Peking (now Beijing)?
Beijing is a city that has changed beyond recognition... almost. I was really lucky that, despite all the demolition and new skyscrapers of the last few decades, many of the locations that featured in the murder were still there. The Fox Tower, where Pamela's body was found, is the last of the original four watchtowers of Peking to survive; the section of the old Tartar Wall around the Imperial City that she was last seen on is the only bit to survive today. While so many of Beijing's traditional old lanes and alleyways (the hutongs) have been bulldozed, Pamela's old home on Armour Factory Alley remains, while both the old foreign enclave of the Legation Quarter and the winding lanes that formed the old red light area of the "badlands" also remain. Pure chance really, but a massive bonus for me, able to wander them and try to imagine what they looked like in 1937.
How convinced are you that the conclusion you draw in the book, heavily founded upon Pamela's father's investigations, is the true solution to the murder?
Pamela's father was indeed, in one sense, a cold man and a distant and unemotional father. When I found ETC Werner's extensive notes on his private investigation to track down his daughter's killers, I knew I was having a "eureka" moment--it'll never happen to me again! But after that initial process of checking and cross referencing and deciding that he had got to the root of the crime with his dogged determination I realized some other things--that he really did love Pamela, that he was willing to ruin his health, bankrupt himself and face personal danger to win justice for her. For me he started as a cold and emotionless man and ended as a deeply committed father; I hope that comes across to the reader because it was a transformation that happened to him and to my view of him during the writing process as his investigation unfurled before me.
Did you find writing about such a heartbreaking tragedy emotionally taxing?
I think there is something profoundly disturbing to our innate sense of natural justice in unsolved murders. We believe that killers should be caught and should be punished. Every night we watch TV shows where the bad guys are caught, read novels where the killers never get away with it, but in real life they often do. Pamela's killers got away with it and then, as the last days of Peking turned into war and the horrors of the Japanese occupation of China, Pamela was forgotten. The old adage "one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" appears to be true. When I started to write Midnight in Peking, I didn't know if I could solve Pamela's murder, I didn't even know if any publishers or any readers would be interested in this old, long-forgotten case, but I did think that it was an important act to record Pamela's brief life--there seemed to me a certain justice in that.
What do you plan to write about next?
I want to stay with literary nonfiction, China and the first half of the 20th century. Back when I first read about Pamela's murder, I had been writing about Shanghai before the Second World War, which is where I live and, I think, know best. I want to tell the story of this incredible city where East met West and created one of the greatest metropolises on earth, with gangsterism to rival Chicago and a nightlife culture to rival New York, which truly became both the "Paris of the East" and the "Whore of the Orient" simultaneously--there are a lot of good tales to tell of those days, believe me! --Jaclyn Fulwood
author photo: Lucy Cavender