Reading with... Paul French

photo: Sue Anne Tay

Born in London, Paul French went to study and work in Shanghai in the 1990s and remained for nearly two decades. He spent much of his time there researching the interwar period in China and the foreign community in Beijing and Shanghai before World War II. His 2012 book, Midnight in Peking, reinvestigated the 1937 murder of an English girl in that city. His latest book, City of Devils (Picador, July 3, 2018), tells the story of the rise and fall of two foreign underworld figures who ran the dance halls, cabarets and gambling joints of 1930s Shanghai.

 

 

The Kremlin Ball (1957) by Curzio Malaparte. He was an Italian author and journalist who flirted with both fascism and communism, but was mostly an intellectual dilettante and a dedicated contrarian. Published from an unfinished manuscript after his death in 1957, the book recalls 1929 Moscow and that strangely bohemian period in the Soviet Union between the death of Lenin and the onset of Stalin's purges. He writes of dashing international communist agitators, beautiful ballerinas, fashionable wives of senior officials and openly gay Russian diplomats enjoying a world of private balls, embassy dinners and literary soirées. It was to be a short-lived time--the arrests are beginning, the grim hand of Stalinism descending, and just about every fascinating character in the book will inevitably end up dead, on the floor of the Lubyanka, with a bullet in their skull.

 

I've also just finished The Passenger (2016) by Lisa Lutz (who now writes on HBO's The Deuce), which is the best contemporary American noir I've read since Nic Pizzolatto's Galveston (2013). I raced through them both in single sittings.

 

 

Kim (1901) by Rudyard Kipling. My first reading teacher at school in London was Mrs. Chatterjee, an Indian lady who wore a beautiful sari to school every day and read us Kipling's Jungle Book on summer afternoons before Home Time. Later I read Kim, and the combination of Kipling's conjuring of India, Kim's freedom to go where he pleased and his being a boy spy was irresistible. I've re-read Kim a few times over the years, and it still has a hold on me. I'm yet to travel the Grand Trunk Road across the Indian sub-continent as Kim did, but one day....

 

Graham Greene: Especially The Quiet American, The Third Man and Brighton Rock

 

James Ellroy: Everything from L.A. Confidential to Perfidia

 

Alan Furst: Everything he's published

 

George Orwell: The Road to Wigan Pier, Burmese Days and Homage to Catalonia as well as the novels Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air

 

Jean Rhys: The pre-war novels and stories: After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight

 

 

A completely predictable one here--I've dipped in and out, made a couple of gallant attempts at read-throughs, but I've never got from start to finish with Ulysses.

 

 

To Bed with Grand Music (1946) by the English writer Marghanita Laski. Laski is rather forgotten these days, but was widely read in her time (the post-war decade). The book was considered outrageous when it was published, barely a year after the end of the war, as it concerns an Englishwoman, Deborah, whose husband is away fighting overseas. Despite swearing eternal fealty, Deborah, bored with life in the country, moves to London and takes a succession of lovers. Laski revealed the sexual excitement of wartime London, the casual liaisons during the Blitz and the liberation many women felt during that time.

 

 

The Spies of Warsaw (2009) by Alan Furst. I was visiting Sydney in Australia and ran out of reading material. I walked into the cavernous Abbey's Bookshop on York Street and this cover grabbed me. I read the book on the plane home in one sitting and became Furst's loyal fan and acolyte. However, the picture that intrigued me has a fascinating history. It isn't Warsaw on the eve of World War II, or Paris before the Nazis arrived. In fact, it's by the British-born Picture Post photographer Thurston Hopkins and is from the Manchester University Students' Union Fresher's Ball in 1955!! Still, it did the job.

 

 

Crash (1973) by J.G. Ballard. My parents were very liberal and never stopped me reading anything or censored my bookshelves. I censored myself when it came to Ballard and, at the time I read Crash, there was a big debate about the themes of the sexual fetishism in the novel. I was excited by the book, but a bit embarrassed about reading it, too, so I stashed it under my bed.

 

 

Brighton Rock (1938) by Graham Greene. I don't remember being very excited by anything we were assigned to read at my North London school until a new young English teacher, Mr Marx, gave us all copies of Brighton Rock. He lured us in by saying there was lots of fighting and it was set in the seaside resort near London we'd all visited. I don't know about the rest of the class, but the book gripped me from the start. That book made me a reader.

 

 

The opening scene of Man's Fate (1933) by Andre Malraux with the assassin Chen poised to strike as 1927 Shanghai is pitched into revolutionary violence:

 

 

 

Rue des Maléfices (1954) by Jacques Yonnet. Written in the 1940s, it tells the story of the tight-knit quarters of Left Bank Paris during the Nazi occupation and the subsequent Liberation.

 

Thérèse Raquin (1868) by Emile Zola. I am a huge Zola fan and this one is the ultimate crime passionnel, a tale of love, adultery and murder that warns us of how obsession and passion can easily tip over into brutishness and cruelty.

 

In a Lonely Place (1947) by Dorothy L. Hughes. For me Hughes is the preeminent American writer of the 1940s. Her sense of foreboding and suspense is classic American noir, and In a Lonely Place is her masterpiece.

 

L.A. Confidential (1990) by James Ellroy. I'd read Chandler, Hammett and Paul M. Cain before, and I've gone back and read them again since. But Ellroy's L.A. Confidential was a watershed moment for me and, I think (as do many of course), that it is a book that redefined the hardboiled, noir genre.

 

The Roads to Freedom trilogy (1945-1949) by John-Paul Sartre. The Age of Reason, The Reprieve and Troubled Sleep are Sartre's attempt to novelize his existentialist theory of human existence. And they are also highly readable novels providing detailed descriptions of life in France, through the eyes of the Parisian philosophy teacher Mathieu, his communist friend Brunet and a cast of characters from different class and political backgrounds.

 

 

The Balkan trilogy (1960) by Olivia Manning. It's called a trilogy but it's really one long engrossing 1,000-page read. For me Manning's book is the most vivid description of Europe on the brink of war as Harriet and Guy Pringle move through Bucharest and Romania, trying to stay ahead of the conflict by moving on to Athens and Palestine, and eventually Egypt and Damascus. There's so much going on and so many wonderful set pieces that the trilogy demands reading and re-reading.