Ok, let’s jump right in. Why should fans of your book go on the Official Midnight in Peking Walking Tour
The original aim of the Midnight in Peking Walking Tour was two-fold – to bring the book, which is a true story, to life by visiting the major locations featured – the Fox Tower, Kuei Chia Chang hutong, the Legation Quarter, the old Badlands etc – and to see parts of Beijing perhaps even longer term residents haven’t fully explored…
How have the sites you mention in Midnight in Peking held up over the past century?
Amazingly, Kuei Chia Hutong has survived almost intact and we can see the Werner courtyard. The Fox Tower, again amazingly, is the only corner tower on the old city wall to have survived and is magnificent up close. That Chuanban and Huoguo hutongs, the old Badlands and Heroin Alley, still survive and are actually being somewhat restored in the area around the old Methodist compound. The Legation Quarter is also still mostly intact though rather impenetrable – the Midnight in Peking Walking Tour is a great way to really examine this unique area of western architecture in the middle of a Chinese city.
What do you think Werner would make of it, if he could see this story recreated for people today? What kind of man was he?
Werner would firstly, and very sternly I expect, correct me where he thinks I’m wrong and then shout from the rooftops for justice for his murdered daughter Pamela. From the day of her murder onward (January 8, 1937) he did nothing else – through the Japanese occupation of Peking, internment during the war, the years of civil war and then the communist revolution through to his eventual leaving of China and subsequent death back in England in the 1950s – he never stopped writing to the British government to try and prosecute the case.
He was a difficult man, a scholar prone to getting into feuds. But he was ultimately a determined and loving father to his only daughter. Her murder came, unsurprisingly perhaps, to define the last twenty years of his life.
How do you think you would have survived in 1930s Beijing?
Well, I have to admit that Shanghai is really the city for me. So I would probably have spent a lot of time with Marlene Dietrich on the Shanghai Express. Otherwise, I like to think I’d have spent a lot of time round at Harold Acton’s courtyard home admiring his jade collection, discussing Chinese literature and perhaps becoming the model for one of the characters in his brilliant novel of 1930s ex-pat Peking, Peonies, and Ponies.
Why do you think this was an important story to tell and make the masses aware of?
It’s a murder – an unsolved murder – and there’s something that offends all us and our sense of natural justice about people getting away with murder. Pamela Werner was just 19, becoming a woman, about to leave for university and life beyond the hutongs of Peking. But she was killed, butchered and left for dead on a cold night on wasteland. Even remembering her in a book now – over 80 years after her death – is a sort of justice, perhaps.
But crime is also a way to lift the lid on a society – in this case Peking’s foreign community in the 1930s – and both its socially acceptable and socially disreputable sides. It’s where these two slices of society intersect that’s really fascinating, and hadn’t really been examined closely before.
What are some of the biggest obstacles you encountered during your time researching for Midnight in Peking?
Well, it’s an unsolved murder – so who did it? was the major obstacle. Once I had all the documents from Werner’s own archive, the police reports, medical autopsy notes, the newspapers of the time and witnesses (both those who left a record and those, children then, who were still alive when I wrote the book). Then the major issue was how to tell the story. I wrote it firstly as a straight non-fiction book, a history book – but it didn’t work, it wasn’t personal enough…too lacking in emotion. So I rewrote it as a literary non-fiction (i.e. no invented characters, locations, clues or events) which allows for a novelistic style of storytelling that I hope brings the people and places alive more.
Anything else you’d like to say before we let you go?
I’ve now done the Midnight in Peking walking tour (4 times!!) with Lars – he’s an amazing tour guide and full of energy. It’s amazing to me that he’s so ‘in’ to the book and the story and has worked hard to enhance the period and the case. I couldn’t ask for a better person to be leading the tour. I know the story of Pamela Werner and 1930s foreign Peking is in safe hands with Bespoke while I’m off finding new tales!!