City of Devils

Starred review from April 16, 2018
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.

Starred review from May 15, 2018
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.

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June 1, 2018
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)