Beijing Confidential: Unsolved Murder Brought To Life

Imagine waking up early one morning and going for a brisk walk in the cold January air. Without warning, you stumble upon a figure lying frozen on the ground. Her blonde hair is matted against her head, her body mangled and her face marred beyond recognition. A diamond-studded platinum watch still encircles her wrist, a sign that this was no mere robbery gone wrong.

This is the scene that Old Chang met one morning almost 75 years ago, after the scandalous murder of Pamela Werner – the 19-year-old daughter of a former British consul. In Paul French’s new book Midnight in Peking, the gruesome (and, sadly, true) details behind Pamela’s case unveil a 1930s Beijing full of glamour and debauchery, privilege and political tension – a Beijing often buried beneath either more traditional eras of the city’s history or the Art Deco pizzazz of Shanghai.

French tells us, "This is a shame – while Beijing may not have been as raucous and wide open as Shanghai, it had its moments, its locales and its characters ... It had its horse racing, swinging hotels and Badlands; it had its gangsters, ne’er-do-wells and murderers. It would be a shame to forget these people while remembering ambassadors, scholars and famous travelers who are, it has to be said, far less interesting on the whole."

While the historical circumstances those individuals faced are a far cry from the Beijing of today (then, Japanese occupation loomed; now, it’s just pollution and shoddy subway escalators), it’s not hard to picture modern versions of the sleuths the book follows: Colonel Han, the top Beijing detective; Inspector Dennis, the Scotland Yard-trained ringer brought on the case; and ETC Warner, Pamela’s crotchety Sinologist father who undertook an extensive private investigation of her death.

Of course, at the center of this faded mystery is Pamela herself. French explained how reading one footnote about her expanded into years of intense research that culminated in an ambitious literary nonfiction account: "Of course you feel an intellectual outrage at a killing going unsolved and a murderer unpunished, but once you see a photo of the victim – see how they looked when they were living and breathing – you engage your heart as well as your head. Pamela’s photo was a studio portrait of a 19-year-old woman who was starting to understand that she was beautiful, that she had a whole exciting life ahead of her. She was on the cusp of real happiness and then someone took it all away." While her murderer was never caught, the book pins down some infuriating suspects from the shady underclasses all the way to the upper echelons of expat society. Even worse, there’s plenty of cover-up, and no Weibo to fight it.

Reading Pamela’s story left me with an indelible imprint of Beijing’s past, so much so that wandering the hutongs a couple of weekends ago, I found myself imagining the sights and sounds French describes: foreign elites spilling out of the old Legation Quarter, the shadowy patrons of the red-light district known as the Badlands and especially the darkened paths at the foot of modern-day Dongbianmen Tower – once called the Fox Tower and believed to be haunted by crafty "fox spirits."

In a rare bout of luck in this eternal construction zone of a city, many of these old locations actually still exist, and a free downloadable audio tour on the book’s website has the author’s own British growl guiding us through the grisly crime scenes and the routes Pamela took on that fateful night. It’s certainly one of the more unique ways to explore a patch of the city extending from Tiananmen Square past the South Second Ring Road, including the legendary tower that now houses Beijing’s oldest contemporary art space, Red Gate Gallery.

It’s quite a thrill to get lost in this rarefied account of lao Beijing, but don’t get too lost – word on the street is it’s a dangerous place.

Explore the Badlands with Paul French at The Bookworm on Sep 14. To learn more about the book and download the free audio tour, visit www.midnightinpeking.com.