Murder and mayhem in Old Peking

Author confronts an old mystery of the capital of china in 1930s

In 1937, the threat of Japanese attack hovered above Beijing. The mood was tense and uncertain, and the city's expat community waited for signs that they would be allowed to remain. When the body of Pamela Werner, the 19-year-old daughter of a high-ranking British diplomat, was found mutilated at the foot of the Fox Tower, the reaction seemed to echo around the world for what it might mean for diplomatic relations between two countries poised to fight encroaching forces.

In Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China, Paul French presents Pamela's story as a murder mystery, pieced together over five years of research gleaned from official archives and newspaper accounts of the day.

The city he paints is one in which poor white Russians populated a seedy underbelly of bars and brothels, where publicly respectable Western expats held nude dance parties and treated Beijing as a lawless frontier.

"At the time, Beijing was like the end of the world for many Europeans and Americans who had left their own countries to escape justice," French says.

"And the murder happened at a time when fear and panic were at an extreme high in Beijing. People thought, what is going on in this city when the Japanese are waiting outside the city, the Communists and the Kuomintang are at war, and this 19-year-old innocent girl is badly mutilated and killed?"

The murder was particularly sensational in that Pamela's body was carved open and her organs removed, in addition to her other injuries. The fact that her father was E.T.C. Werner, a retired senior British diplomat who remained highly visible within China's expat community, only ensured that the case was front-page news not only in China but in Werner's native England.

In April, London's Kudos Television announced the purchase of serial television rights for the book, and although French cannot reveal details of who will be involved, he says that the show has been given a Downtown Abbey-level budget and "big names" will appear.

"We're going to CGI (computer-generated imagery) the whole of Old Peking," he says. "The show will follow the book identically, with some possible extension of the narrative in flashbacks of Pamela's life. We want to recreate the old hutong and the atmosphere of the time."

The investigation of Pamela's murder was of special interest in that Chinese and British detectives worked together, cooperating and coordinating in a joint effort to find Pamela's killer, French says.

"The detectives on both sides simply wanted to solve the murder," French says. "But it was a very political case. The British government didn't want it to be a foreigner, because they didn't want scandals to be revealed within the white community. There was a potential for a loss of face or prestige. With the Japanese surrounding the city, people wanted law and order, and of course the nationalist government also wanted to show that they were still in charge of things in Peking."

The case was ultimately never solved, but Midnight in Peking presents French's theory for who was responsible in convincing fashion. He traces every step of the official investigation, and then E.T.C. Werner's later efforts when the police had officially given up. Pamela's father devoted the rest of his life to finding the murderer.

French, who came across Pamela's story in a footnote of the biography of Edgar Snow, an American journalist and author of Red Star Over China (1937), said that he was immediately drawn to the case for the enormous scandal it created at the time. He began researching the murder in a search that took him from Shanghai to the UK, the US and Beijing, he says.

"I was very lucky," he says. "The important thing was that every single thing that was done in the case - every interview, every questioning - was kept record of by both the British and Chinese. The Chinese archives were off-limits, but so many of the diplomats and people involved in the case were British, American or Japanese, that I was able to access the archives."

French wrote the book at home in Shanghai, and it was edited, designed and printed in China by Penguin's China office, French says. This is unique in that most books about China by Western writers are produced and published in Western branches, he says.

While he is confident in the conclusions he has drawn about the identity of Pamela's killer, the book also includes footnotes to his sources, he says.

"I think it all adds up," he says. "But I put the footnotes in and if anyone has another theory about who the killer was, they're welcome to give it a shot."

French's next book will focus on American and Jewish gangs who went to war over casinos in 1940s Shanghai.

"I think that Western audiences are very interested in old China, because everyone's heard the New China story now," he says.

kdawson@chinadailyusa.com

(China Daily 08/03/2012 page30)