Paul French
Biography, history, "true" crime
Let's start a representative quote. It's opening night at Farren's, the glittering jewel in the crown of Shanghai's hectic eve-of-war demimonde of nightclubs and gambling venues:
Here's the honorary Cuban consul, a man with his hand permanently out for cumshaw; the slimeball Portuguese commercial attaché, talking up Macao's neutrality with his arm round the honorary Brazilian consul--the Portuguese mobs paid both men three times as much as their government salaries in squeeze every month. Here also is the nest-feathering brigade of officials from swamps like Venezuela, Mexico, Chile, all with passports for sale and letters of transit falling like confetti, no worth more than gold. A Portuguese visa had been a few hundred dollars' cumshaw to a corrupt official a year before; now the price is treble, quadruple. Still they mingle--Portuguese bossman Fat Tony Perpetuo, Macassared hair slicked back with some simmering señorita on his arm, trades gossip with fellow countryman José Boletho, while the consults in white linen suits hover near and smile through nicotine-stained teeth.Here's the thing: "letters of transit" do not exist. They're a plot device made up for the movie Casablanca. Paul French either doesn't know or doesn't care; he refers to them at least twice more.
That's City of Devils for you. Lively, beautifully visual, fast-paced, written in the best choppy hard-boiled style, visceral, an incredible sense of place, full to the bursting of cinematic scenes and sharply-delineated characters . . . and it's bollocks. Not all bollocks. Probably a good half of it might be true. Good luck figuring out which half, though.
It's a ripping yarn, mind you. It's written like a combination of Raymond Chandler and Sebastian (The Perfect Storm) Junger. If you made a movie about it, which could easily happen, it'd be a kind of art-deco Blade Runner. Definitely read City of Devils if you like this sort of thing. Just keep in mind that some unknown fraction of it is bollocks.
Liked the book for sense of place. It captures that chaos on the edge of war very well. If you want _history_ with footnotes and all, try Ristaino's Port of Last Resort (2002) on Shanghai's diaspora in the interwar years.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your points in favor of the book. Nor do I require footnotes and all. At the same time, City of Devils is so blatantly unreliable that it has to be regarded as (at best) docudrama. I read it with pleasure, but learned very little.
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