An upright schoolteacher is found to have sadistic tendencies and is shipped off to Britain.

In a welcome turn away from orientalist cliché, the book makes the westerners in Peking seem like an assortment of oddballs, standing out amid a crowd of Chinese who are getting on with their lives as best they can.Ī respectable American dentist turns out to be the leader of a nudist club (and his own consulate thinks him capable of more sinister and abusive activity). Paul French's narrative of the investigation is spellbinding, drawing the reader from the very first pages into an unwholesome, macabre world where nothing seems to make sense.

Perhaps it was more convenient, and less embarrassing, to think that crazed Chinese ritual killers might be responsible. Yet over and over again, the police were steered away from details that might throw the spotlight of blame on to the white community. The Legation Quarter of the city where expatriates under treaty protection tended to live was at the heart of the investigation, and an unusual joint Chinese-British police operation was instigated to get at the truth. Was there a hidden side to her life, people asked, that had led to her terrible death?Īn investigation was launched, but it quickly ran into trouble. Unusually, though, she spoke fluent Mandarin.

Pamela had been an ordinary expatriate schoolgirl, something of a loner, but keen on ice-skating and listening to big bands on the radio. The victim was Pamela Werner, daughter of ETC Werner, well-known in the British community as a former consul and academic sinologist. All the blood had been drained from her body and in a particularly gruesome detail, her heart was missing, ripped out through her broken rib cage. On the morning of 8 January 1937, the body of a 19-year-old girl was found at the foot of the Fox Tower in Beijing. As with the death of Heywood, the circumstances were deeply suspicious. The mixture of high politics, elite lifestyle and murder, all in the setting of a rapidly changing China, has caught the attention of millions of newspaper readers around the world, who couldn't have found Bo's city of Chongqing on a map three months ago.Īnother murder involving a Briton in China attracted popular attention three-quarters of a century ago.

If the rumours being floated by the Chinese authorities are to be believed, Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, plotted to have Neil Heywood, a British businessman, killed and may even have paid thugs to force him to drink poison. T he scandal surrounding the former Chinese Politburo high flyer Bo Xilai has turned from political intrigue to something much more sinister.

Midnight in peking by paul french