In his novel, Midnight
in Peking, author Paul French has unravelled one of the capital’s
most gruesome murder mysteries – that of Englishwoman Pamela Werner who was found on Russian Christmas 1937 with her heart ripped out of her chest.
The crime went unsolved for 74 years, but French has gotten to the bottom of
it. Here, he introduces the key suspects.
ETC Werner
Pamela’s grieving father was Edward Theodore Chalmers
Werner, one of the best known and most respected foreigners in Peking, but also an odd and aloof man. Not for ETC Werner
the goldfish bowl-like social life of the Legation Quar ter with its private
clubs, snobbishness and whispered gossip. Werner chose to live in Chinese
Peking, in the Eastern
City on a hutong called
Armour Factory Alley that still exists today. He was a scholar, a former
British diplomat who spoke eight Chinese dialects, had first come to China in the
1880s as a young interpreter and, though retired, had stayed. But rumours had
long swirled around the reclusive ETC Werner – rumours about just how his
supposedly beloved wife had died 15 years earlier and whether foul play was
afoot. Now those suspicions resur faced and people began to ask, could a father
murder and mutilate his own daughter?
Pinfold
In the 1930s, the ‘Badlands’ – the few acres of jerry-built hutongs
just to the east of the Legation Quarter – was where the pimps, prostitutes
and drug dealers of old Peking congregated around dive-bars, cheap cabarets and
brothels. Here, the police found a Russian man called Pinfold, a prime example
of what was known as foreign ‘driftwood’; the white criminal underclass of Peking. Pinfold, like the Badlands
themselves, slept all day. He prowled the Eastern Tartar
City by night. Pamela was
last seen alive ice skating in the Legation Quarter and her body was found at
the Fox Tower
– between these two locations was nothing but the Badlands.
In the middle they found Pinfold, with a knife, drenched in blood.
Prentice
Many an eyebrow was raised in the Legation Quarter when an
American by the name of Wentworth Baldwin Prentice was brought in for
questioning. Prentice was on very familiar terms with many members of the highest
echelons of Legation Quarter society as the premier foreign dentist in Peking. But his wife had long returned to America, and
rumours circulated of a sordid nudist colony in the Western Hills, salacious
private parties replete with naked dancing girls and a ‘love cult’ involving
some of the most prominent foreigners in Peking, all led by the allegedly
debauched dentist. Soon the world of the upright and uptight Legation Quarter
and the down and dirty Badlands would merge –
and they already overlapped more than many would have liked to believe.
Midnight in Peking is available from Garden Books for 180RMB
This feature originally appeared in the September 2011 issue of Time Out Shanghai
