Whilst the investigation into the death of Werner was never officially resolved, her case garnered a very high profile - her father was a long-time resident and former British Consul in China, an interesting, complex man. The book takes the reader into the intricacies of the foreign Legation Quarter, and the lives that the areas inhabitants lived, surrounded by the poorer areas of Peking, on the verge of the Japanese invasion of China.
MIDNIGHT IN PEKING is a combination of what happened, analysis of the police investigation, and guide to 1937 Peking. I'm guessing it's not everyone who would turn such a footnote into an indepth investigation and analysis of a case, although this is a particularly fascinating case. A footnote made reference to Edgar's wife Helen feeling nervous after Pamela's mutilated body was found not far from the Snows' house in Peking.". Not just the unputdownable story of a savage murder, Midnight in Peking is a sweepingly evocative account of the end of an era.At the end of MIDNIGHT IN PEKING, French writes "I first read of Pamela Werner in a biography of the American journalist Edgar Snow, whose best selling Red Star Over China introduced the world to Mao Tse-tung in the late 1930s. 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. 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. 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. But the case was soon forgotten amid the carnage of the Japanese invasion. Her heart had been removed.Ī 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. It was Pamela Werner, the teenage daughter of the city's former British consul Edward Werner.
On a frozen night in January 1937, in the dying days of colonial Peking, a body was found under the haunted watchtower. The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Paul French's Midnight in Peking, a gripping, true murder mystery story read by the actor Crawford Logan.
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