Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China

Midnight in Peking is the true story of the vicious killing of a British diplomat's daughter, nineteen year old Pamela Werner. Her brutalized body was found along the old Ming wall at the foot of the Fox Tower in what was then called Peking. It was January 1937. The young woman's corpse was desiccated and half frozen, her tartan school girl skirt torn, her heart missing. The sordid tale of Pamela's life and death enthralled Peking's expat community with rumors of fox spirits and mistaken identity and in the end it exposed corruption and negligence at the highest orders of two governments.From its outset, Midnight in Peking is necessarily gory, but what makes this book worthwhile is how it blends criminal investigation with a alluring cast of characters and a forgotten city. At its core, this is a book about a place that has all but evaporated. January 1937 was the beginning of the last year of a Peking the world would never see again. It was a city in which white expats and ordinary Chinese people coexisted in a tense rat's nest of political intrigue, suspicion and fear. At the time of Pamela's murder, Peking was a last bastion for lost souls. It was populated in large part by White Russians, exiles, Jewish refugees and stateless people who had long ago shed their skins, their identities and their claim to any kind of legitimate legal life. Chinese warlords imported American and Canadian body guards who wanted to forget their often criminal pasts and biracial hermaphrodites ran cabarets with élan, sliding effortlessly between genders and races while Russian whores succumbed to heroin addictions in the back rooms of brothels. In 1937 Peking expats were living in the last days of city that was quickly slipping away. Most of them just didn't know it yet.Right in the thick of it, the mutilated body of a young English woman becomes a symbol of all the depravity and human debris contained within the city walls. Pamela is the unlikely personification of Peking's perverse underbelly and a portent of what was already looming in the hills above the city.Pamela Werner's story is a scintillating blend of slaughter, deception and history. Pamela, a grey eyed, fair haired girl, seems almost banal at first, but she is actually the strange embodiment of Peking's fraught expat population. She began her life as an orphan, one of the many unwanted offspring of the White Russian residents of the city who often languished in dense poverty. She was adopted by a British diplomat, the preeminent Sinologist and all around unlikable eccentric, E.T.C. Werner. Pamela was fluent in Chinese and lived quite happily in the bifurcated world of Peking. There was no one quite like her in her circles and the true reality of her existence and experience uncoils itself throughout the course of the book. In the end, Pamela's story exposes the worst side of a beguiling city as well as the darkest heart of human nature.Paul French is a accessible, precise writer. He tells the story as a lost history and vividly resurrects obscure characters with complete personalities. The author creates a portrait of Peking that is as bewitching as it is bizarre and in doing so captures a fascinating moment in the city's life when it teetered on the brink of war.A year after Pamela's murder the Japanese invaded Peking from the hills that surrounded it, sundered and victimized the city, massacred an untold number of Chinese and interred the remaining expats (including Pamela's father). The grey eyed girl who was left butchered in a ditch was all but forgotten. If it wasn't for her strange father, who exhausted his personal fortune by financing a private investigation, Pamela and her tragic tale would have been entirely lost. But E.T.C. Werner was relentless and he left behind his extensive notes, which, in the deft hands of Paul French, reveal not only the identity of Pamela's killer but also the perverse underbelly of long lost Peking.Pamela Werner is buried somewhere under the second ring road in a city that now bares almost no resemblance to the place she knew and loved. As Beijing continues to grow and shape shift I found it endlessly interesting to learn about how this place was once, not so long ago, when war waited in the hillsides and Fox spirits haunted the old Ming wall in a prodigal city.(review originally published on OceanPerson.com)

This is a true crime novel about the upper middle class adopted daughter, Pamela Werner, of a ranking English Civil servant, Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner, who was found brutally murdered [organs removed from the body and all her ribs broken outward] on January 8, 1937 about a month before her 20th birthday.Supernatural spirits were first thought to have done it as the body was found in the Shadow of what was colloquially called the Fox Tower, thought to be inhabited by the spirits of foxes; it was actually a guard tower to the walled enclave of the foreign ligations of Peking. The body was found in an area just outside of the walled city called the badlands and would be similar to what we would call the slums.The first two thirds of the book involves telling the story of both the Chinese head police detective involved in trying to solve this case, a Colonel Han Shik-cheng and his British counterpart, one Detective Chief Inspection, Richard Harry Dennis, especially assigned to assist Colonel Han as the murder involved a relative of ex-British Consul although the body was obviously found on Chinese soil.Along the way to the solution of the riddle surrounding the murder we are introduced to a real cast of characters as drunken cops, various thugs, several prostitution rings - the assorted pimps and madams, a shady but discrete nudist colony catering to those with eclectic sexual tastes, various warlords each trying to protect their respective turf, and the two main detectives who are hampered in their quest for answers, but for widely divergent reasons.It was thought for some time that the victim may have been mistaken for the wife of a communist leader hated by the regime of Chang Kai Shek, other avenues suggested the sordid sex rings, drug use, sex with her school master, and merely the wealthy foreigners' deviant sexual desires having gone one step too far on this particular night. We learn of high level police pay offs, and too many other twists and turns to begin to list them all.But throughout the story the love of Pamela's father the ex-British consul never wavers and in his typical British bulldog determinism he pursues the evidence and spends all his money to track down the killers of his daughter. But to not spoil the killer's identity and motive, I will let you read the story to find out the identity of the killer and why he/she or they did it.The story vividly describes the lifestyle of the ex-patriots of each of the foreign countries involved. Depending on your desire to be like the rich and famous, you will either wish you could have been there or thoroughly detest it. However, this is not a book you will want to put down until you find out who could have committed such an outrageous crime.

Midnight in Peking is an intriguing book which looks at the gruesome murder of Pamela Werner at the same time as the Japanese were poised to invade China.ETC Werner was Pamela’s adoptive father, a retired Consul who was an academic of Chinese with a particular interest in mythology and language. When his daughter Pamela failed to come home that cold winter’s evening in 1937 he searched for her, sadly her mutilated body was found at the bottom of Fox Tower with her heart and other organs removed.The book is seriously well researched with many documents examined which gives the reader the feel of the ex-pat community in Peking, and it is telling that Pamela had been ice skating before bicycling home, activities that her peers living in the UK could easily have been doing. What Paul French evocatively describes is the gated community, Legation Quarter, where most of the ex-pats lived, although not Pamela and her father who lived outside, and then there was the were the ‘Badlands’ where life was a whole lot more tawdry and where the Russians congregated eager to sample its fast food outlets and brothels. Through the whole book you can’t fault the descriptions of the places that were familiar to Pamela.The book is of course focussed on who killed Pamela and it comes up with a valid scenario based on his combing of the archives and not least the efforts of her father who made it his mission to keep the investigation into his daughter’s death alive. ETC Werner is painted as a complex character and he clearly didn’t set out in life to win friends, indeed quite the opposite so when he bombarded anyone who he thought had power with letters full of his suspicions about the perpetrator with letter after letter. In a link to ETC Werner’s work we also hear about the Chinese superstitions which relate to the spirits that haunt Fox Tower where Pamela’s dismembered body was discovered.Equally interesting is the history of the creeping invasion of the Japanese through China and the knock on effect that had on the ex-pat community as well as the wider implications for the Chinese. This is a slice of history that was new to me and although my geography is particularly poor this part is explained well enough that I easily followed the time-lines and could visualise the widening of the areas under Japanese control.This is a non-fiction book although the majority of the book is very readable, however I did get bogged down in the early section of who was who in the ex-pat community in China with its lengthy section on not just who did what now but what they’d done before without any real idea of the part they would play in Pamela’s story. This is a minor criticism of a book that bought a time and place to life long after both had disappeared.Having read the investigation carried out by the author I felt his theory worked although the fact that the case was never solved seemed to be for people in high places supressing the truth rather than it was never known. The real mystery that remains is ‘who was Pamela Warner?’ because this is a young woman, despite being represented as a school girl she was in her late teens, who was a mass of contradictions.

A captivating account of the investigations into the death of Pamela Werner in January 1937, the often bungled police investigations obstructed by national agendas and desire to preserve image, as well as possible corruption and the sad account of a persistent father who struggles against many odds to find out the truth; how he was ignored and cast aside at many stages. Yet, his files eventually surfaced and provide insight into a complication and compromised society who had other, perhaps more pressing, items of their agenda at the time. Paul French captivates story in a compelling manner, taking the reader forward through the expected to the unexpected and sections of society that people preferred simply to ignore at the time. I thoroughly recommend this to any reader - a story which may have overwhelmed by the atrocities of the wars to follow, but which needed to be heard and understood for future generations.

A truly inspiring work.I live in Beijing and reading this has been an absolutely fascinating look into a side of the city that I never really gave too much thought to. French delivers such a clear picture of what it must have been like in pre-war Beijing that you are effortlessly transported back to that time.The story itself is more than compelling and it took me only two days to read it. I know it's a cliche but I really couldn't put it down.French's interest in the tale is very apparent and a lot of toil must have gone into recreating the facts of the mystery. This comes through with his great attention to detail.I will be heading for the Fox Wall and the neighbouring hutong as soon as I can.

This is an amazing tale of cold blooded murder and the dreadful cover-up by the British Consulate. But what an electtric piece of research and writing. I could not put the book down and yet, I was horrified by what I was reading. I was apalled by the attitude of the British Consulate, who were evidently trying to save face. What for, I do not know for at the time of the murder, the Japanese troops were already in China and at the gates to Peking. I applaud the author for such a fantastic piece of journalism and for preserving the memory of the poor girl. Highly recommemded, but be prepared to be shocked!

What a mystery! As someone interested in murder, both real and fictional, why had I never heard of this one? Perhaps because it happened in Beijing. This story of a father's pursuit of justice for his savagely murdered and mutilated daughter is a constant page-turner. Mr French approaches the mystery, not as a writer of detective fiction, but as an historian, and that adds to the story, he doesn't have to search for angles, the real plot is full of them! A great read about a slaying in the shadow of the Japanese atrocities in wartime China. This is a world that has disappeared but Paul French brings it vividly back to life.