Shanghai is a Janus-faced city. Walk along the waterfront Bund and gaze across the Huangpu River to see the future—the towering skyscrapers and dazzling lights of the Pudong financial district, where 21st-century money never sleeps. But turn your back to the river and what stands before you is the city’s past: the grand colonial edifices of early 20th-century trading houses, where fortunes were made and lost in an earlier time. Between 1842 and 1941, the Bund anchored the eastern edge of Shanghai’s foreign enclaves—the International Settlement (jointly run by Great Britain and the United States) and the French Concession. To these protected zones, where Chinese law had no standing, hopefuls came from around the world to make their mark on finance, industry, entertainment and the arts. Shanghai was a land of reinvention and opportunity. ...

Review continues at Wall Street Journal link below.

It's an incredible non fiction book that reads like a novel. Beautifully written and researched. Amazing. Life in Shanghai in the 1930s. The corruption of drugs, prostitutes, illegalalities all around. And then came the Japanese who ruined this idyllic and crazy life. It's a must read for everybody!

Paul French writes another NF like a true thriller. He writes as if he took a time machine back to 1935. Great work done here.

French reconstructs the heyday of vice in 1930s Shanghai, led by two outsized characters--a Viennese Jew who rose from gigolo and dancehall expositions to run a classy casino, and a veteran American sailor-brawler-goon whose ability to import slot machines and intimidate allowed him to command huge influence in the Shanghai underworld. While taipan families slummed and White Russian refugees from 1917 scrambled to survive on prostitution and menial labor, Nationalist government officers enjoyed the floor show and watched the Japanese close in. This book is 3 stars rather than 4 because it form didn't allow French to show his research work, and the the narrative muddled in the late 1930s as the two men's schemes and conflicts repeated with escalating stakes.

It's honestly hard to imagine just how much work Paul French put into his latest work. He doesn't merely write about the fascinating and nearly-forgotten Shanghai of old; he delivers such rich, intimate detail about life in the foreign concessions and the near-unbelievable cast who inhabited it that he will make you feel like you're right there. "City of Devils" is a wonderfully immersive reading experience that shouldn't be passed up on.

Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley
Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom opens in 1935 at a club in the city of Shanghai. Jones is going to met a gangster, and, of course, the shit hits the fan. It is a Hollywood version of what Shanghai was like during the interwar years. Yet, there is some truth to it. The city did have Badlands, and there were clubs that not only hired but catered to expatriates from America and Europe. In his book City of Devils, Paul French presents the truth and while it does involve show girls there is a great more drugs, murder, and the looming threat of war.
French details Shanghai, in particular Joe Farren and Jack Riley, two men who were sometimes engaged in legal business and sometimes in not so legal business. Joe Farren started as a Fred Astaire or Vernon Castle type. Escaping Vienna and touring Asia with his wife and the dance troupe they eventually started. Farren is the dapper man, the married man with his wife Nellie. He does resemble, at least in French’s description.
Riley is more of a gangster type. American, blunt, and physical as opposed to dapper. But not stupid, not stupid at all. His washing up at Shanghai isn’t so much to do with his performance ability. The two men are sometimes partners, sometimes rivals, sometimes enemies.
In the story of the rise and fall of the two men, French also describes the imploding of Shanghai as an international colony forced upon the Chinese as well as the coming Second World War. It isn’t just crime that causes the problems but also the Japanese and the shifting of power.
At points, French introduces newspaper columns and Chinese views on what is occurring – either the view of the white men or the invading Japanese. It is those bits that are the most moving and wonderful because they move the book beyond a simple history of the underworld.
French writes with passion and vigor. His prose is quite engrossing, and he does the best he can with limited sources. What is most interesting (and hardy lest surprising) is that the women were harder to trace than the men. It is to French’s credit that he shows the women as more than just molls or enablers. In fact, a few of them are movers and shakers.
The book is both engaging and engrossing.

…The swells, the punters, the opium, and a few extra gelts…

Paul French’s City of Devils combines one part oral history, one part entertainment rag, and one part true crime story to tell the bawdy history of the boom days in Shanghai between the wars. French describes it as “The Wild East,” an international settlement where fourteen governments looked out for the political and legislative whims of their own citizens.

This is the war zone of sex, entertainment, gambling and drugs that American on the lam Jack Riley, and Viennese dance-troupe leader Joe Farren ran to in the early 1930s to escape their pasts and find their fortunes. From their humble begins as bar owner and chorus line director respectively to dope smugglers and owners of the biggest night clubs in the city, the men spent a decade in Shanghai hurtling towards the tragedy of excess.

French’s writing is transformative in time and culture. The first part of the book is told entirely in the rhythm and lingo of gangster-talk, a mixture of Far East slang, mafioso toughness, and cultural euphemisms. Other parts of the book take a step back and allow for a more complete and nuanced look at the varied players in the illicit underworld. The reader can only imagine the exhaustive amount of research French has done to put together the pieces of these people’s lives. I thoroughly the excerpts from one of the criminal-funded newspapers, The Shopping News, the author placed between chapters.

City of Devils is an awesome trip back in time, and Paul French should be commended for his imaginative storytelling. From the high rollers at the hai alai courts and the glitz of the dance reviews to the machinations of the world powers at the beginning of the second war, French strives to tell the complete story.

Thank you to NetGalley, Picador Books, and Mr. French for the advanced copy for review.