China, 1937. In Peking it was a time fraught with expectation, most of it bad. The Japanese had overrun the north of China and were now circling the city. They had carried out their three Alls (Kill all, Destroy all, Burn all - a scorched earth policy) and for a hundred miles in every direction the land was useless burned waste. Refugees from this formerly rich agricultural area were flocking to the impossibly crowded city and the Japanese themselves were infiltrating, recruiting collaborators and bringing in large quantities of opium and heroin, making them very cheap and increasing enormously the number of drug addicts.
In anticipation of the Japanese attack, which finally came in midsummer (the Rape of Nanking occurred the following December), most of the westerners in the city were leaving for Tientsin, Shanghai, or their summer homes in Peiteiho. But the European Jews who had come to China fleeing Hitler, the White Russians who had fled the Bolsheviks, and the criminals who had fled everyone, had no papers, no money, no future, no hope, nowhere else to go. Meanwhile, the remaining non-Chinese with any money spent their time drinking too much, reading month-old newspapers, dancing to music popular years earlier in New York and Paris, wearing 1935 fashions, and in the case of the British, still in January of 1937 awaiting a photo of the new King George VI to hang on the wall of the club.
It was in this city, this atmosphere, that the body of a young English girl was found on the morning of 8 January 1937 by a Chinese man out walking his songbird. She had been dumped at the foot of the 15th century Fox Tower, part of the Tartar Wall and the route the girl normally took returning home from the hotels, clubs, ice rink, and other amenities in the western Legation Quarter. Pamela Warner lived in a courtyard home on Armour Factory Alley in the Papermakers Quarter with her father, who was in his 70s and an Old China Hand who first came to the country in the 1880s.
Because the girl's body was found in the Chinese part of the city, Detective Colonel Han Shih-ching was in charge of the investigation. An ex-Scotland Yard detective, DCI Richard Dennis was sent from Tientsin to assist him. The two detectives got along well and went about their work in a logical and thorough manner. They interviewed her father, the family servants, the girls she spent her time with, some boyfriends, the headmaster of the school she attended, and many others who might know something about the crime.
They uncovered some surprising scandals. Many people in the China at the time had pasts they were not talking about. But the officials came up with very little about what happened on the night of 7 January and after the usual 20 days that a Chinese detective was given in 1937 to solve a murder, the inquest left the case open and the police went back to their routine.
But her father was unsatisfied and undertook his own investigation, sending out fliers in Mandarin, employing Chinese detectives, and uncovering some shocking discrepancies in the evidence Han and Dennis gathered and the dismaying truth about the crime and about the underworld of both European and Chinese Peking of 1937. He wrote repeatedly to the British officials in Peking and London with the results of his investigation, but was repeatedly brushed off. It is from those documents, along with newspaper reports, which have been sitting in dusty files in government archives and libraries, that the author has been able to piece together the real story of Pamela Werner's death.
I have a friend who lived in China in those turbulent times which made this all the more interesting to me. But the story is tightly written, is evocative of the crumbling world that was Peking in those pre-war years, and is a true crime story to rival the best murder mysteries of the time.
2012 No 74