Paul French on “City of Devils”
In May, the Historic Shanghai Book Club read City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir, so ahead of our talk, we sat down with author Paul French to find out more about interwar underworld Shanghai, rumor and gossip, old Shanghai’s soundscape, and lots more.
Historic Shanghai: What drew you to tell the tale of Jack Riley and Joe Farren?
Paul French: It seemed to me that these two men, who had great backstories, really symbolized the inter-war Shanghai story I wanted to tell: on the run, literally and metaphorically, exiled, stuck, reinvented, survivors. One of the problems with true crime – which is a great genre to get people interested in unfamiliar periods and places – is that you can only really write about people who got caught. Once they’re caught, then there are newspaper articles, police records, and court transcripts. And both men were ‘characters’ in inter-war Shanghai—entrepreneurs, self-promoters, stylish (in Joe’s case) men-about-town—so they were written about and remembered.
“Old Shanghai was also a contradiction, and that’s what makes it interesting.”
HS: You’ve written a great deal over the years about old Shanghai – from Carl Crow to foreign journalists to Bloody Saturday, and even the gypsies. What is it about pre-49 Shanghai that has inspired this volume of work?
PF: Pre-1949 Shanghai is a massive story. No other international settlement or treaty port was nearly as large or powerful. But old Shanghai was also a contradiction, and that’s what makes it interesting.
Shanghai was created through violence, blood, and criminal enterprise (opium), yet it became a place of refuge. First to Chinese fleeing poverty, flood, drought, epidemic, Taiping, warlords, rural and provincial boredom. Then it became a sanctuary for 30,000 Russian émigrés from Bolshevism, 25,000 European Jews from fascism, more Jews fleeing pogroms, gypsies, and other marginal groups. They all found a safe haven in Shanghai, at least temporarily. And, of course, the gangsters, conmen, grifters and generally shady types did, too. People on the margins and people who decide to live outside the norms are really the only interesting people. It’s why nobody writes novels about accountants or tax lawyers!
HS: The incredible detail in City of Devils really conjures up old Shanghai. Tell us about your research process – and the challenges involved in writing about characters with much to hide, characters from the underbelly of Shanghai society.
“Rumour and gossip are vital in writing about the underbelly “
PF: I haven’t really done anything else except China since the mid-1980s–the vast majority of which concerns Shanghai–and you naturally acquire a lot of knowledge over time. I’ve read just about everything – every newspaper, police record, archive, magazine, academic paper. I’ve also walked the streets, and catalogued every one of them. (The Old Shanghai A-Z). I do old Shanghai and China for breakfast, lunch, and dinner–books, articles, research, screenplays, documentaries, radio projects, blogging, audio recordings. And I’ve been publishing on old Shanghai since 2005, so a lot of people contact you.
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