Midnight In Peking
Midnight in Peking, a book by Paul French
Midnight in Peking has all the captivating elements that make it an amazing work of historical fiction. Based on a true crime that occurred in a time long past in the last century, it fuses history, diplomatic hypocrisies, cultural critiques (even-handedly as against all involved) and a thread of Chinese mythology, interwoven in a masterful prose.
The story opens with a Chinese myth about the fox spirits. In Chinese folkloric imagination, the fox spirits are demons that symbolise lies, betrayal, seduction and death. The fox spirits feed on human lives to sustain their own immortality. Pamela Werner’s killers murdered her brutally, mutilated her remains, removed her organs, then abandoned her in the depths of the night, exposed and near unrecognizable, at the foot of the Fox Tower in Peking. The folks of old Beijing believed that the fox spirits haunted this tower. It was also the only tower that had no guard post in Beijing at the time.
In any type of society, a murder like this would cause a sensation. The investigation into Pamela’s death unfolds amidst an exceptionally unnerving time in history. The official invasion of Beijing by the Japanese was imminent. The murder happened on January 7, 1937. Japanese forces were already hovering in the vicinity of the former capital of China then. As such, residents of Beijing, be they locals or foreigners, were ridden with the idiosyncrasies that typified a population certain to be besieged at the cusp of World War II. The murder set the rumor mill into full throttle. Beijingers and foreigners alike made frenzied speculations into the circumstances of Pamela’s death. Meanwhile, the underworld profited enormously from the sentiment that “there is no tomorrow.”
In his dramatic exposé, author Paul French lays bare the dark strands of human nature that kept the true circumstances of Pamela Werner’s brutal murder under wraps for almost a century. Every party that was even remotely involved in the investigation of the murder was, perhaps not surprisingly, driven by self-interest. The webs of lies, conniving fraternity, scandalous lead-ups to the murder, the hush-ups of blackmailed witnesses, and political pressures on all levels presented a case impossible to solve even by the best-intentioned and seasoned detective.
When it became clear that justice would run cold for his daughter, E.T.C. Werner, a former British Consul himself and a well-known scholar of sinology, took matters into his own hands. He exhausted his resources to find out who killed his daughter. With tenacity, he pulled all the strings he could as a former diplomat. He unearthed the leads that were buried in the memories of the drug addicts and prostitutes of the underworld. He managed to piece together the events that led to Pamela’s killing on the night of the murder and the people that were guilty and complicit in the murder. Most importantly, he learned the motivation for killing and then mutilating Pamela.
In writing this riveting account of Pamela Werner’s death, Paul French culled through the historical archives in the United Kingdom. In this process he happened upon an uncatalogued box of documents, containing the original communications of E.T.C. Werner in his pleas for justice to British authorities to re-open the case for his daughter. The author’s intentions are clear—it is to give Pamela Werner justice, albeit only as a matter of history, and coming a century late. His work displays a keen sensitivity to the unique historical and political contexts that rendered the murder a cold case, which remains officially so now.
This is the second book by Paul French that I have read. I have previously reviewed his book North Korea, A State of Paranoia, which is a scholarly study of North Korea.