Review: Midnight in Peking

FRENCH, Paul, Midnight in Peking, Penguin Group (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., Camberwell Vic., 2012.

Reprint: octavo; paperback, with colour endpaper maps; 278pp., with 16pp. of monochrome and full-colour plates. Minor wear; text block bent. Very good to near fine.

When I started this blog (seems like ages ago now) one of my aims was to highlight the notion of the Cthulhu Mythos in China, something which seemed to me to have been studiously ignored by the roleplaying and literary agencies out there, regardless of the fact that China crops up as a reference in every other Lovecraft work, or in those of his circles. In starting my research, I was blown away by the book Shanghai – History of a Decadent City by Stella Dong, because it covered material of such outstanding ferocity that even the worst writer on the planet couldn’t help but produce a work which would make the reader sit up and take notice (I’m not saying that Dong is a poor writer; far from it – she’s a great writer and a better historian. However I suspect that, given the material, any attempt at literary fireworks would simply have fallen by the wayside in the face of the gob-smacking revelations which she was imparting, so she just rolled it all out, without the frills). Given the sheer scale of corruption and decadence that was China at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, I couldn’t think of a better place for Keepers to think about setting up their Call of Cthulhu campaigns and so I began this blog to start people thinking in that direction. Many years later, I followed a few scraps of information which led me to the awareness of this particular book. Serendipitously, it showed up at a bookshop which I was volunteering to help set up and I claimed it as the reward for my assistance. That was a day ago – I literally could not put it down once I had cracked the covers.

If Republican China is a place where it’s possible to populate the landscape with Lovecraftian horrors, it’s because it’s a place that was already teeming with monsters. Not the scabrous, squamous, tentacled abominations of HPL’s imagination, but monsters nonetheless; corrupt and soulless, walking the world in suits of human flesh. This book drags them out into the light of day.

The matter of this work is the murder of a young British woman of White Russian descent and the dumping of her body outside the walls of the Chinese (at that time) former capital. Deaths were a dime a dozen at this time, in that place, but it was her connexions which gave this crime precedence: she was the adopted daughter of E.T.C. Werner, a former diplomat and renowned sinologist, with certain beneficial links to the nascent Chinese government, the Kuomintang. Pamela Werner had gone ice-skating in the Foreign Legation section of the city – that portion which was besieged during the Boxer Rebellion almost forty years previously – and had vanished. The next morning she was found beside a defunct moat outside the old city walls, near an old watchtower of haunted reputation, and so mangled as to be almost unidentifiable. She had been brutally bashed and stabbed repeatedly all over her head and torso; she had been cut open from her neck to her pubis and her ribs had been broken, snapped outwards, the sternum ripped away; her heart, liver, bladder and one kidney had been removed and her stomach, although in situ, had been disconnected at the base of her oesophagus and the top of her small intestine. She was only identified by the distinctive colour of what remained of one eye and a platinum watch which she was wearing on an arm which someone had tried to hack off. What followed was a tortuous police investigation, hampered by a maze of diplomatic stonewalling, jurisdictional arguments, political game-playing, corruption and sheer ineptitude.

Paul French, a writer living and working in China, conjures the seedy and wicked depravity of Republican era Peking, detailing unflinchingly the sordid nature of the back-alley bars, opium dens and whorehouses, sheltering cheek-by-jowl with the high-class hotels and international clubs. This bizarre juxtaposing of the expensive and sumptuous with the tawdry and dissolute is the hallmark of China at this time and French brings it glowingly to life. As well, he deftly sketches the main players in the investigation – Colonel Han Shih-ching, the local police detective representing the Chinese authorities; DCI Richard Dennis, dragged-in from Tientsin to assist Colonel Han and to act as an intermediary with the police forces of the International Legations, led by Commissioner Thomas; and the dead girl’s father E.T.C Werner. As well as a veritable rogue’s gallery of shifty diplomats, shady underworld types and conniving thugs, French conjures the despicable world of 1937 Peking, where anything and anyone are up for grabs in the name of sick entertainment – even a 19-year-old school girl. With the looming presence of the Japanese army encircling the city in a grip of steel, French paints a sordid world of frenzied hedonism whirling faster as the inevitable hammer-blow approaches.

Shocking as the details of Pamela’s desecration are, even more shocking is the willingness of the International authorities, the incumbent Chinese legal apparatus and even the invading Japanese overlords to turn their backs on the crime and bury it in red tape and obfuscation. In the end, it is only the girl’s father, spending his entire personal fortune, who gets to the bottom of the story, after detectives and policemen have been ordered away, sent home, or killed off. In the interests of “saving face” everyone abandons Pamela and any notion of justice for her murder. In fact, French reveals that he found Werner’s self-compiled investigation report in a box in London labelled “Miscellaneous Correspondence” where it had been buried by the British Government and successfully ignored for over eighty years. It contained all the pieces of the puzzle and all the answers.

The sheer travesty of humanity and governance revealed by this incident is bewildering. These individuals, supposedly representing the apex of decency and civilisation, bend over backwards to distance themselves from the crime, which exposes them to ridicule and censure; in their own way, they are no more human than the monsters in human skin-suits who perpetrated the act. French leads us through the whole series of events slowly stripping away layers of deceit and corruption until we are left with what can only – in retrospect – have been the outcome desired by all parties involved: a swift sweeping under the carpet of an ugly episode followed by a return of the status quo.

Yes, there is no justice at the end of this book. We know, ultimately, what happened to Pamela and French sifts the clues to provide clear probability where the chain of evidence falls thin. No-one walks away with clean hands here; everyone is tainted by guilt and complicity. In fact, E.T.C. Werner, at first presented to us as an insufferable academic thwarting any attempt at empathy due to his intellectual rigor, is revealed as the only person in the story largely free from blame. That French is able to squarely point his finger to where culpability lies is only due to Werner’s painstaking search to find his daughter’s killer, a quest that consumed the last years of his life.

Paul French has crafted a horrifying true tale of murder and international cupidity. It deftly catches the wildest heights of Republican China with Japanese agents provocateurs lurking in the shadows, destitute White Russians dying in the alleys, canny rickshaw drivers selling information, a Korean hermaphrodite trading underworld secrets, and even a clandestine nudist colony established by the British in the mountains west of the city. Every time I dive into this murky barrel of base humanity, I find myself shocked by some new revelation and French serves it up palpable and steaming.

Four-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.