Despite the rampant destruction of the old Peking, some of the city French describes survives today, including the Fox Tower, one of the last remaining sections of the city wall, and Armour Factory Alley, where Pamela lived with her father in a refurbished courtyard home. He paints a vivid picture of life in the Legation Quarter, the extraterritorial enclave where the city’s foreign residents lived under their own laws, and the luxurious clubs and hotel bars where they traded gossip between dances and whiskey sodas. His book on Pamela, Midnight in Peking, is a fascinating tale of life and death in a city on the brink of all-out war, a world of corruption, hubris, brutality and madness. Other possible suspects included Pamela’s father, an antisocial retired British diplomat turned China scholar, and a mysterious sex cult organized by foreign men in Peking.įrench, a business consultant whose previous books have covered historic Shanghai, North Korea and foreign journalists in China, was intrigued and began investigating the case. Snow and his wife Helen were neighbors of the Werner family in Peking, and she feared that Kuomintang agents intent on silencing her and her husband had killed Pamela in a case of mistaken identity. She was reduced quite literally to a historical footnote, one that author Paul French came across while reading a biography of American journalist Edgar Snow, whose 1937 book Red Star Over China offered one of the first in-depth profiles of Communist leader Mao Zedong. In the years that followed Pamela’s case dropped from the headlines, replaced by stories of carnage that spread across Europe and Asia. China was soon consumed by a full-scale Japanese invasion, and the brutal killing of one innocent was but a precursor to the deaths of many more.
The investigation, headed by an unusual pairing of a local Chinese police colonel with a Scotland Yard veteran, foundered. The crime shocked the city’s Chinese and foreign residents, and newspapers worldwide carried details of the grisly murder. An expensive platinum and diamond watch was still on her wrist, discounting robbery as a motive. She had been bludgeoned and repeatedly stabbed, her heart and other organs removed and her body drained of blood. Follow a frigid winter morning in 1937, an old man walking near the Fox Tower of Peking’s crumbling city wall discovered the body of Pamela Werner, a 19-year-old English student.
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