Midnight In Peking, French - B

                                         The author is a British resident of Shanghai, specializing in inter-war Chinese history and present day analysis of Chinese affairs for western publications.  This book is sub-titled 'How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China.'  I think it might better be characterized as haunting her father and embarrassing Old China.  Nonetheless, it is an international best seller, an Edgar Award winner, and is slated for a television mini-series. In January 1937, on the eve of the Japanese conquest of China and initiation of WW2, 19-year-old Pamela Werner was brutally slaughtered in Peking.  Her father was the retired British consul, which meant that a British policeman was required to liaise with the local Peking police. The embarrassment stems from the fact that no one really seemed to want the murder solved.  We learn later that it was committed by a cabal of ruthless psychopaths, a few Americans and a few Europeans, who committed the murder in a White Russian brothel, where they took the young woman after kidnapping her. The inquiries conducted in the winter of 1937 were thwarted by both the British and local authorities. The Brits seemed to be more concerned about protecting the reputation of a seedy school principal, at whose residence Pamela had resided. After they learned that he was a bad apple, they rushed him home to England. Plus, the victim's dad was an eccentric old man, who absolutely no one liked. The whole aim of Chinese justice appears to have been to sweep the crime under the rug and forget about it. In any case, it was quickly forgotten because the Japanese  invaded and occupied the old Imperial capital.  Consul Werner never gave up and solved the case, but was not able to have the perpetrators arrested because war, and then revolution, intervened.  The author discovered the story when he found that the wife of Edgar Snow, the noted journalist who introduced Mao to the world in 'Red Star Over China', feared that the murderers may have been looking for her.  She lived two doors down from the victim and she and Snow feared that the Kuomintang's version of the Gestapo was after them.  The book's success is undoubtedly attributed to the writer's skill and his insight into a forgotten world. China entered WW2 a failed state, suffering from an unresolved decades long civil war, and without a meaningful governing system.