City of Devils

Reviews / Votes

In Mr French, who has spent years chasing Shanghai's ghosts, it has its champion storyteller. City of Devils is based on real people and events. With a fabulist's flair, Mr French supplies whatever details were withheld by the archives he has ransacked . . . The story is brought alive by Mr French's Shanghai-noir telling, which echoes Dashiell Hammett and James Ellroy . . . He grips his reader to the end. * Economist * When is a novel not a novel? When it's 'narrative non-fiction' . . . French's louche and moodily lit recreation of Shanghai is thrillingly done -- Laura Freeman * The Times * Written in a demotic, joyously profane and daringly idiosyncratic style . . . [close to] the urgent hepcat prose of James Ellroy's mid-career pomp. As with The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential, its style and subject matter are perfectly attuned, enhancing the book's doom-laden film noir atmosphere . . . deserves to replicate the popularity of Midnight in Peking * Literary Review * 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 * 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 * A brilliant neo-noir about the rise and fall of two refugee outlaws at the end of Shanghai's golden age in the 1930's. Not since JG Ballard's Empire of the Sun or Andre Malraux's La Condition Humaine have I read a book that has so captured the decadence, pulchritude and madness of the 'Paris of the Orient'. I cannot recommend City of Devils highly enough. * Adrian McKinty * To understand the 'surrealistic city', as Shanghai is often nicknamed, City of Devils is an absolute must. It's a solid, groundbreaking historical true crime account, written with such vivid, well-researched details. It totally captured me, a native Shanghainese, in a time capsule of passions and pathos about the city's unknown past. * Qiu Xiaolong, author of the Inspector Chen series * Fast-paced, plot-twisty true-crime tale of the kingpins of Shanghai's Old City, land of miscreant opportunity. A Casablanca without heroes and just the thing for those who like their crime stories the darkest shade of noir. * Kirkus * Drugs, gambling, vice, and banditry power China's seaport mecca in this rollicking true crime saga . . . In French's wonderfully atmospheric portrait, Shanghai is a tapestry of grungy dive bars, swanky nightspots, drunken soldiers, brazen showgirls, Chinese gangsters, corrupt cops, and schemers . . . French's two-fisted prose makes this deep noir history unforgettable. * Publishers Weekly * With the narrative rhythm of classic noir and the polyglot slang of 1930s Shanghai, French, winner of an Edgar and a Gold Dagger for his true-crime best-seller Midnight in Peking, tells a fast-paced, page-turning yarn about the rise and fall of two of the city's crime kings . . . Gripping * Booklist * Such a rich tapestry of characters is every author's dream, but weaving their stories together within the confines of a city that didn't exactly cherish the preservation of documents and proper names takes immense skill. It also requires a love for the ways of this labyrinthine settlement, nurtured by French's years spent navigating its back streets. French superbly conveys the surrealism of life in Shanghai -- Charles Ginger * Real Crime Magazine * Plunge yourself deep into the mean milieu of Shanghai in the 1930s with this hard-boiled beauty of a chunk of noir . . . The atmosphere created runs the gamut from claustrophobic and dark to electric and menacing . . . With every human vice on show, this is excess all areas writ large. Love it! -- Jon Wise * Sunday Sport * Move over Weimar: Paul French's City of Devils, a history of glam and seedy interwar Shanghai's refugees and criminals, is nostalgic noir at its best * New York Magazine * A story with the dark resonance of James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential and the seedy glamour of Alan Furst's between-the-wars mysteries . . . Reader advisory: By the time you are done with this extraordinary book, you will believe in devils, too. * Newsday * It's hard to go wrong with dope, decadence, and the demimonde . . . French recounts all this with great energy and brio * New York Times * A love song to Shanghai . . . Knowing, cynical, slangy and carrying a crafty sting in its tail, this is the voice in which City of Devils is narrated throughout, as though it's being told over strong drinks in a dive bar. French channels the hard-boiled prose of Chandler and Ellroy in a rhythmic, tough-guy patter . . . Recounts with great panache an extraordinary period -- Marcel Theroux * Times Literary Supplement *