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.

The problem with the underbelly and the marginal is that it’s hard to dig out – there has to be some guesstimating. That’s problematic for academics, but less so for literary nonfiction. Still, once you start using rumour, gossip, and libel, you build up a massive picture of the city, which ultimately you can’t – and I did think about this hard – you simply can’t footnote. It just comes from too many sources, reliable and unreliable. I think rumour and gossip are vital – think of any case now and how important it is (5G causes coronavirus; burn vinegar to get ride of SARS; Trump has Alzheimer’s, and on and on and on). Academics can’t use this, but Japanese kirin devils in Hongkew, alligators in the Huangpu, wolves in Sheshan, are all really key to atmosphere. And all true…

HS: One of the details that brings the book to life is your use of language, or I should say languages – from Yiddish to Russian to some very specific Shanghai and ’40s slang. It SOUNDS like old Shanghai must have. How did you decide to do this, and how difficult was it to do?

PF: If you don’t make an attempt to recreate the soundscape of old Shanghai (and I try with the smells, too, you may note) then a book really annoys me – it’s like a Downton Abbey script putting 21st century words into characters’ mouths. Think of all those novels, set in the 1920s, with people in Shanghai saying ni hao! Bonkers and wrong.

We get snippets of the lingua franca earlier in pidgin, and then later in some writings and drawings. The Shanghailander used all sorts of phrases and words: Yiddish and Russian — the great Russian verbal shrug, Nichevo, for instance — slang from the American, Australian, and British variants of English. And of course people used foreign languages without knowing it – Bund, stengah, shroff, etc.

The Chinese, too, had their own polyglot hybrids – think of [1930s avant-garde writer] Mu Shiying and his use of English advertising phrases and Hollywood movie references. I particularly like terms like huangbaoche, which was how you called a rickshaw,. Every single Shanghailander, or sojourner, would have known this phrase. You’d hear it constantly. Now nobody knows it.

I should note that nowadays it’s not really possible to recreate the racial epithets and slang that would have been universal at the time – even “Japs”, which appeared on a hundred newspaper paper front pages a day during the period, is verboten now. It’s a big debate – if we don’t show the racism of the time, then those who say it wasn’t so bad get a free win, maybe?

HS: The link between organized crime in the US and Shanghai is fascinating! Any idea what crime syndicate chief Meyer Lansky thought of dealing with China as a supplier?

PF: Lansky was interested in Shanghai – indeed, he read voraciously on China. He owned a collection of books by Carl Crow, which was recently at auction– 400 Million Customers, The Chinese Are Like That – all signed and with Lansky’s own annotations. Lansky’s family contacted me as they wondered if I could identify if they ever met (I couldn’t).

But Lansky ultimately opted for Cuba. Why? Maybe because other elements in the Jewish mob (noted in the book) were already in Shanghai, Lansky didn’t like to share, and it would have led to a fratricidal war in the New York Jewish mobs. More likely, Cuba was closer and he liked the nightclubs and casinos more than the dope business.

But the drug link is crucial. American writers all talk about heroin and opium replacing alcohol after Prohibition, yet the Shanghai connection is rarely mentioned, even though Shanghai was a massive player. Ask where all the poppy came from, and they don’t know. The answer, of course, is Shanghai: Shanghai provided the dope. America taught China to refine opium into heroin, which became massive during WW2. The Japanese taught the Chinese how to cook meth; the Chinese then taught the GIs who went back to California, became Hell’s Angels and started the meth trade…but that is another story!

HS: What was it about this particular time period in Shanghai’s history that made it the perfect storm for criminal elements?

PF: Three elements. 1) Totally easy entry: no passport, visa, or even a requirement to state your correct name and date of birth. 2) Quite simply, America’s long-term refusal to deal with its recalcitrant citizens in China. There was no court until 1906, and they were reluctant to take on criminal cases. Plus the history of corruption in the US diplomatic service in Shanghai is shocking, and deserves its own book. 3) The inability of anyone to really regulate and control the activities of refugees, stateless and displaced persons. No court or country was paying much attention to the White Russians and Jewish refugees (speaking of other books, someone needs to do a study of the Jewish refugees focusing on the criminals, con artists, and those who collaborated with the Japanese and Nazis. The CIA’s post-war files list over 50 Jewish refugees in Hongkew that were informing on others to the Nazis in Shanghai! Now there’s a story!)

HS: What three Shanghai books would you recommend to the book club, and what are the top three books you’d recommend to people who’ve read City of Devils and want more of the same?

PF: Three Shanghai books: Maurice Dekobra’s Shanghai Honeymoon (1946), Don Smith’s China Coaster (1954) and Steve Dodge’s Shanghai Incident (1954) are three great fun novels about Shanghai (Dekobra is a much underread French author of the 1930s who was a bestseller then, while the last two are in the American pulp tradition). No longer in print, but can be picked up second hand on ebay.

Three books on the hidden underbelly and interstices of cities that inspired City of Devils – James Ellroy’s LA Confidential which, although a novel, is essentially the hidden history of post-war LA and a neo-noir (i.e. a historical take rather than contemporary); Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz which exposes the different sides of Weimar Berlin and whose modernist approach to the city is highly influential, and Jacques Yonnet’s Rue de Malifice (sometimes called Paris Noir, or Street of Witches, in English) – really the most influential to me as it mixes reality with myth, legend, superstition, gossip, and rumour to recreate the working class and criminal milieu of a Paris occupied by the Nazis. It’s a staggering book that’s been sadly long forgotten by English readers, though the French still read it quite a lot. 

For more on our Book Club, click here.