By Liz Soares
The murder at the heart of this tale is suitably horrific--in 1937, an English schoolgirl is killed, her body mutilated, in the fabled Chinese city.
The setting is exotic--expat Brits and Americans mingle with traditional Chinese (the men in blue gowns, strolling with their cages of songbirds) and exiled White Russians. The Japanese are advancing on the old capital. Rickshaw drivers ply streets lined with dive bars, opium dens and brothels.
Most of the Westerners live in a gated community called “The Legation” where they enjoy all the comforts of home--and probably more, considering this was the era of the Great Depression.
The cast of characters is fascinating. The girl’s father is a renowned scholar of Chinese culture--but also a failed diplomat with a closet full of secrets. There’s also a smarmy American dentist, a Scotland Yard-trained copper, and a Canadian tramp with interesting connections.
Add to this a botched and hamstrung investigation that is all but over when the Japanese arrive, brandishing their own peculiar forms of cruelty, and you have the makings of a page turner.
French tells the story as it unfolded, so the reader follows the investigators as they consider suspects: Pamela Werner’s boyfriends, her headmaster, and even her father. Red herrings abound.
The case almost disappears into the maelstrom of the times. But E.T.C. Werner, Pamela’s father, doggedly pursues all leads, hires private eyes, hounds British authorities and ultimately reconstructs the terrible story. In the end, like a well-done fictional murder mystery, it all makes perfect, awful sense.
French writes that he encountered the case in a footnote in a book about the rise of communism in China. He then painstakingly pieced together the story--of one girl’s gruesome death, of the end of old China, and of the destruction of one outpost of colonialism, with all its attendant evils.
