Review | Vignettes of 1930s Shanghai, and the famous and infamous characters that inhabited it

Destination Shanghai by Paul French tells the vibrant and villainous tales of a host of Westerners who made Shanghai their home in the early 20th century

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The Bund in Shanghai, in the 1930s. Picture: Alamy

Richard Lord

Published: 10:30pm, 16 Jan 2019Updated: 9:32am, 17 Jan 2019

Destination Shanghai
by Paul French
Blacksmith Books

Paul French’s entertaining “Destination Shanghai” relates 18 stories of Westerners in Shanghai during the 20th century, some of them famous, others unknown.

The London-based French, author of the 2012 novel “Midnight in Peking”, is a former long-term resident of Shanghai, and each of the stories here is a mini historical investigation rendered in the author’s hallmark noirish reportage. French is fastidious in his research and provides much illuminating detail – both historical context and narrative minutiae – where it is available, so we learn, for instance, precisely which bars American playwright Eugene O’Neill visited on an epic pub crawl.

All but one of the stories take place during the first half of the century, and 13 of them in the 1920s and 30s – a lively period in Shanghai’s history as far as foreigners were concerned. They are of dramatically varying length; the opener alone, featuring O’Neill, takes up a full sixth of the book.

This reflects the unevenness of the historical record, with far more source material available on the famous than on the lesser known, but also the fact that some of Shanghai’s well-known visitors and residents were distinctly larger than life. O’Neill – who carouses around the city before going missing, spinning an elaborate web of misdirection with the aid of accomplices, and successfully hiding from view his companion: lover, Carlotta Monterey – is one of them.