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The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai
by Paul French
A rags-to-riches tale of two self-made men set against a backdrop of crime and vice in the sprawling badlands of Shanghai.
Shanghai, 1930s; it was a haven for outlaws from all over the world: a place where pasts could be forgotten, fascism and communism outrun, names invented, and fortunes made - and lost.
"Lucky" Jack Riley was the most notorious of those outlaws. An ex–U.S. Navy boxing champion, he escaped from prison and rose to become the Slots King of Shanghai. "Dapper" Joe Farren - a Jewish boy who led Vienna's ghetto - ruled the nightclubs. His chorus lines rivalled Ziegfeld's.
In 1940, Lucky Jack and Dapper Joe bestrode the Shanghai Badlands like kings, while all around the Solitary Island was poverty, starvation, and war. They thought they ruled Shanghai, but the city had other ideas. This is the story of their rise to power, their downfall, and the trail of destruction left in their wake. Shanghai was their playground for a flickering few years, a city where for a fleeting moment even the wildest dreams could come true.
"Starred Review. 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. " - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. A Casablanca without heroes and just the thing for those who like their crime stories the darkest shade of noir." - Kirkus
"With the narrative rhythm of classic noir and the polyglot slang of 1930s Shanghai, French...tells a fast-paced, page-turning yarn about the rise and fall of two of the city's crime kings." - Booklist
"Brings interwar Shanghai to life in a gritty work of narrative non-fiction...a vivid picture of the city's nightlife and criminal underworld...it is a fascinating tale of a city on the edge." - Post Magazine (UK)
"City of Devils is an astonishing achievement, magically transporting the reader back to Old Shanghai, then sweeping us through its streets and its bars in a gripping, breakneck ultra-noir narrative reminiscent of vintage Ellroy." - David Peace, Author of Tokyo Year Zero
"A brilliant neo-noir about the rise and fall of two refugee outlaws at the end of Shanghai's golden age in the 1930s. Not since JG Ballard's Empire of the Sun have I read a book that has so captured the decadence, pulchritude and madness of the "Paris of the Orient"...French's prose is economical, razor sharp and lyrical...If you're interested in Shanghai, World War Two in the east, I cannot recommend City of Devils highly enough." - Adrian McKinty, Award-winning author of the Detective Sean Duffy Series
"To understand the "surrealist city," as present-day Shanghai is enigmatically called, Paul French's City of Devils is an absolute must. A solid, ground-breaking historical true-crime narrative, it is written with such vivid, well-researched details and totally captured me - a native Shanghainese - as if in a time capsule of the heretofore-unknown past passions and pathos of the city." - Qiu Xiaolong, Award-winning author of Inspector Chen series
"Few writers are more expert at mingling crime narrative and social history, journalistic precision and novelistic sweep, than Paul French. His books paint times and places so beguiling and tell stories so vivid and harrowing that, within pages, we're utterly in their dark thrall. If you love Richard Lloyd Parry and David Grann, don't miss City of Devils." - Megan Abbott, Edgar award winning author of You Will Know Me and Give Me Your Hand
This information about City of Devils was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Paul French was born in London, educated there and in Glasgow, and has lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His book Midnight in Peking was a New York Times Bestseller, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and will be made into an international mini-series by Kudos Film and Television, the UK creators of Broadchurch and Life on Mars.
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