Review by New York Times Review
SHANGHAI IN THE 1930S. Anyone familiar with detective novels or noir cinema knows exactly what that phrase means: smoke-filled nightclubs, back-alley gambling houses and dark, seedy opium dens, all frequented by a motley assortment of Chinese mobsters, White Russian emigres, fugitive criminals of all nations and at least one gorgeous femme fatale with a past. Designated an international treaty port after the 19th-century Opium Wars, Shanghai eventually became a kind of global melting pot of the Seven Deadly Sins - what one writer called "a tawdry city of refugees and rackets" - largely controlled by foreigners determined to fleece the town of every copper yuan or Mexican silver dollar it could yield. By the 1930s, Shanghai was the fifth-largest city in the world - and, to hear some tell it, a corrupt and drug-addled place like no other. Just how much of this notorious reputation is historical fact and how much is Hollywood (or neocolonialist) fantasy is hard to say, and "City of Devils," Paul French's new narrative history of the city, is not likely to clear matters up. Though the book shows signs of being exhaustively researched, much of the material, by the author's own admission, has been freely embroidered. " 'City of Devils' is based on real people and real events," French writes in his preface, but because of the sub rosa nature of the episodes described, "assumptions have been made." Translation: Details have been invented. Even reproductions of newspaper articles have been punched up "with one or two minor additions in the interest of advancing the narrative." And since French includes no endnotes or even a list of sources, it's impossible to know just where the facts end and the folklore begins. So the book is perhaps best regarded as historical fiction and, like many a good novel, it centers on the rags-to-riches ascent of a colorful protagonist - or, in this case, two colorful protagonists. Joe Farren, born Josef Poliak in the Jewish ghetto of Vienna, comes to Shanghai as a penniless exhibition dancer hoping to become "the city's own Flo Ziegfeld"; Jack Riley, an American originally named Fahnie Albert Becker, is a former Navy seaman and wanted ex-con who shows up with a dream of making a fortune on illegal slot machines. As newcomers to this "city of reinvention," they must start at the bottom of the gangland pecking order and work their way up, eventually partnering together on a drug-running operation that proves lucrative enough to make both of them major players in Shanghai's criminal economy. Their big break, however, comes in 1937, when the Japanese invasion of Shanghai changes the geography of sin in the besieged city, isolating the international settlement and moving its main vice district to a nearby area instantly called the Badlands. Joe and Jack, filling the power vacuum left by the decampment of native Chinese crime lords, collaborate on a venue called Farren's, "the biggest, fanciest, richest nightclub and casino Shanghai has ever seen." And from there they reign over the city's reconstituted underworld - until war and Jack's criminal past catch up with them, bringing the pair down along with the bad old Shanghai they have helped to build. French, the author of "Midnight in Peking," recounts all of this with great energy and brio. He writes in the knowing, slangfilled idiom of Shanghai's Shopping News, a gossipy English-language newspaper he quotes repeatedly throughout. And if the book is never quite as engrossing or entertaining as it should be, it is at least atmospheric enough to keep one turning pages. After all, it's hard to go wrong with dope, decadence and the demimonde. This may be Shanghai as seen through a cinematic Western lens, but there are few more fascinating places - in fiction or in fact. GARY krist is the author, most recently, of "The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Before WWII, Shanghai was the Paris of the Orient, but the level of criminal underground activity had foreign powers fearing it would also become Chicago on the Whangpoo. With the narrative rhythm of classic noir and the polyglot slang of 1930s Shanghai, French, winner of an Edgar and a Gold Dagger for his true-crime best-seller Midnight in Peking (2012), tells a fast-paced, page-turning yarn about the rise and fall of two of the city's crime kings. Joe Farren fled Vienna's Jewish ghetto, and Jack Riley escaped the Oklahoma State Penitentiary; in Shanghai, the former staged the best chorus lines, and the latter introduced slot machines. At their height, Farren and Riley built Shanghai's largest and most extravagant nightclub, matched by an equally dramatic downfall with the types of twists and turns that prove truth is stranger than fiction. Relying, due to the elusive subject matter, on mostly anecdotal sources, as French explains, this gripping history is interspersed with gossip-rag excerpts and swirling rumors as the tension mounts, Shanghai's complicated international politics intensify, and the war begins.--Rothschild, Jennifer Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Drugs, gambling, vice, and banditry power China's seaport mecca in this rollicking true crime saga. Historian French (Midnight in Peking) recreates Shanghai between the world wars, when its extraterritorial status-the United States, European nations, and Japan legally controlled parts of the city-made it a booming metropolis and home to a teeming expat community of Jews fleeing Nazism, Russians fleeing bolshevism, and shady Westerners fleeing their pasts. French's panorama centers on Joe Farren, a Viennese Jew who became a dance-show impresario and casino-owner; and Jack Riley, an escaped convict from Oklahoma who ran slot machines, smuggled heroin, and financed Farren's classier enterprises. In French's wonderfully atmospheric portrait, Shanghai is a tapestry of grungy dive bars, swanky nightspots, drunken soldiers, brazen showgirls, Chinese gangsters, corrupt cops, and schemers like "Evil Evelyn," a madam who enticed wealthy wives with gigolos and blackmailed them with the resulting photos. The 1937 Japanese military occupation darkens the party with war, privation, and despair. French's two-fisted prose-"When Boobee hops on a bar stool, lights an opium-tipped cigarette, and crosses her long legs, the sound of a dozen tensed-up male necks swinging round is like... a gunshot"-makes this deep noir history unforgettable. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Shanghai-based French, whose Midnight in Peking was a New York Times best seller, tells the story of Jack Riley and Joe Farren, who made their fortunes off the music halls, bars, theaters, slot machines, and all-'round vice that ruled 1930s Shanghai.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Fast-paced, plot-twisty true-crime tale of the kingpins of Shanghai's Old City, land of miscreant opportunity.The old "Terry the Pirates" comic strip had it right: The mysterious East was just the place for an enterprising lawbreaker to homestead. So it was for a sad sack named Jack "Lucky" Riley, who changed his name after releasing himself on his own recognizance from a stateside prison. He skipped across the Pacific to the Philippines and "buddie[d] up with the Navy boys and jump[ed] a U.S. Army transport heading for Shanghai." In his past life, Riley had boxed for the Navy, and he knew his way around a ring and a gaming table. It wasn't long before he graduated from flophouse to better digs and began to run his own gambling empire, clashing with a tightly run syndicate of Viennese Jews headed by "Dapper" Joe Farren, whom the press styled as a kind of China-based version of Flo Ziegfield. Other figures, including tequila smuggler Carlos Garcia and New York mobster "Yasha" Katzenberg, enter and exit French's (Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China, 2012, etc.) carefully constructed stage, each one up to no good. In addition to this suspenseful yarn, the author paints a striking portrait of a Shanghai on the eve of Japanese occupation, which would bring many a crime empire to its knees. Before then, foreign governments were as keen on divvying up the spoils as the gangsters were. Even if one jurist intoned that "we will have no Chicago on the Whangpoo," French's hard-boiled narrative makes it clear why Chinese partisans resented the presence of the foreign barbarians, to say nothing of unfortunate collaborators like Cabbage Moh, whose head ended up on a pole "as a reminder that nobody gets to play both sides in their Shanghai."A Casablanca without heroes and just the thing for those who like their crime stories the darkest shade of noir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
