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Midnight in Peking

The Murder That Haunted the Last Days of Old China

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Midnight in Peking

By: Paul French
Narrated by: Crawford Logan
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About this listen

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Paul Frenchs’ Midnight in Peking, a gripping, true murder mystery story read by the actor Crawford Logan.

Who killed Pamela Werner? On a frozen night in January 1937, in the dying days of colonial Peking, a body was found under the haunted watchtower. It was Pamela Werner, the teenage daughter of the city’s former British consul, Edward Werner. Her heart had been removed. A horrified world followed the hunt for Pamela’s killer, with a Chinese-British detective team pursuing suspects including a blood-soaked rickshaw puller, the Triads, and a lascivious grammar school headmaster. But the case was soon forgotten amid the carnage of the Japanese invasion...by all but Edward Werner. With a network of private investigators and informers, he followed the trail deep into Peking’s notorious Badlands and back to the gilded hotels of the colonial Quarter. Some 75 years later, deep in the Scotland Yard archives, British historian Paul French accidentally came across the lost case file prepared by Edward Werner.

Unveiling an undercover sex cult, heroin addicts, and disappearing brothels, the truth behind the crime can now be told - and is more disturbing than anyone could imagine. Not just the unpause-able story of a savage murder, Midnight in Peking is a sweepingly evocative account of the end of an era.

©2012 Paul French (P)2012 Penguin Audio
Asia China Murder True Crime Crime Exciting Scary Detective Mystery

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All stars
Most relevant
Without a doubt one of the better audiobooks in my audible library. The subject matter, the setting, the narrative pace and the extraordinarily gifted reader all blend together to form an unforgettable listening experience.



This is one of the few audiobooks that I know I'll return to in a year or so. My experience was enhanced by having read other historical documents from this era of Peking, but the political inner turmoil as documented here through the lens of a suspicious murder, corrupt officials and chinese folklore was just tremendously enjoyable.

Exciting

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An interesting subject but was there sufficient fact / research to write a book? Seemed to make the very most of the material but the conclusions could have been reached in half the time.

Fascinating.

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Fascinating study into the brutal murder of Pamela Werner, whose mutilated body was dumped upon a desolate, superstition-haunted waste ground skirting the Legation quarter of Peking in January, 1937. Just nineteen years old, her heart had been removed and the blood drained from her corpse. The crime was an outrage that made international headlines at the time, but was a horror soon subsumed by the imminent Japanese Invasion. Official investigation was hamstrung by corruption and complacency as events overtook the moment.
Historian and author, Paul French evokes a lost world with this portrait of the waning Colonial Peking of the 1930s, capturing a gilded community of ex-pats, privileged chancers, petty diplomats and bored youth on the cusp of dramatic change. The book provides an informed but accessible historical-political context for the story, coming most alive when describing the seedy demimonde of the Peking Badlands: a flophouse district of brothels, casinos, opium dens and slum rookeries populated by the desperate and indigent jetsam of a world in turmoil. Here, amongst the heroin smugglers and people traffickers, the small-time lowlife and destitute Tsarist exiles, bright young things would dance through the last nights of a passing era.
French keeps his sympathy with Pamela pinned to the forefront of the story, but is blessed by a narrative rich with colourful characters, bizarre twists, exotic atmosphere and lurid details; Graham Greene and Raymond Chandler would build careers from these sort of ingredients. With official investigation perfunctory and the case unsolved, French draws many of his conclusions from a private report collated by Pamela's father, whose dogged attempts to find justice for his murdered child met only with heart-breaking intransigence from the supercilious Colonial authorities.
Veteran actor Crawford Logan provides a patrician tone to the narration, dignified but capturing the author's latent sense of outrage at the callousness involved.
The audiobook format means that occasional recaps from one chapter to the next seem more frequent than they would on the page, and whilst the lack of photos is a shame, the story is easily strong enough to ignore such issues.

The Heart of the Matter

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I loved listening to this story and learning something about the history of Perking and the life lived there by the ex-pats. It is terrible to think of the miscarriage of justice that happens, and 'who you know', matters just as it does today, sadly. Anyway, a great book and very well read :)

Amazing story

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a true story, well researched and told as an intriguing historic tale rather than with the invention of dialogue

compelling story absent of dialogue

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