SAYS FYL

Book Review: Midnight in Peking by Paul French (Penguin Books)

Until I met my husband, I didn’t know True Crime had earned itself a Dewey Decimal number. I had no interest in the genre, even after discovering its huge following—readers who seem to thrive on reliving crime with the kind of detail usually reserved for fiction.

So when I borrowed this book from my local library, I thought I was picking up “history.” Less than twenty pages in—after line upon line describing a corpse riddled with stab wounds—I realized I was reading my first true crime.

And I. Was. Fascinated.

Paul French wastes no time setting the stage: one winter morning in 1937, the body of a young girl is found at the foot of Beijing’s Fox Tower. Oddly, her body has been drained of blood and her heart is missing.

From this chilling discovery, French pulls you deeper into the life of Beijing: its customs, its back alleys, the secret lives of its British expatriates, and the politics shaping its destiny. While staying true to historical fact, he imagines the inner thoughts of his characters, which gives the book a faint fictional flavor. I appreciated the well-placed expatriate jargon (“amah,” “number one boy”) and Mandarin phrases—they lent authenticity without overwhelming the prose.

Almost as fascinating as French’s storytelling are the photographs in the middle of the book. My advice: look at these first. They don’t spoil anything, but they provide a visual context that enriches the reading.

In the end, the book is a prosaic quilt: history, anthropology, and true crime stitched together with threads of fiction. It reads with the veracity of non-fiction and the intrigue of a novel.

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