Midnight in Peking
The Murder That Haunted the Last Days of Old China
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for £12.99
-
Narrated by:
-
Crawford Logan
-
By:
-
Paul French
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 AudioThis 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 My experience was enhanced by having read other historical documents from this era of Peking, but the political inner turmoil as documented here through the lens of a suspicious murder, corrupt officials and chinese folklore was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
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Fascinating.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Amazing story
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
compelling story absent of dialogue
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.