Early on the morning of January 8, 1937, a rickshaw driver noticed something odd at the base of Fox Tower. This couldn’t be good—superstitious Peking residents believed the ancient landmark was haunted by demons that appeared as beautiful women, malicious succubi who loved their male victims to death.

Approaching the tower, the terrified driver realized he had discovered a body. The victim was anything but typical: it was a foreign girl, well dressed with expensive jewelry, her corpse splayed open and savaged with the frenzied brutality of a maniac.

The victim was identified as Pamela Werner, daughter of a prominent British resident. Colonial and local authorities hauled in a seasoned cop from Tianjin to pursue the investigation, giving it 20 days to succeed—after that, the trail would grow cold.

More than 70 years later, Shanghai-based writer Paul French reopened the investigation, and the result is Midnight in Peking, a story of the hunt for Pamela’s killer and a portrait of foreign Peking counting down the days to the Japanese invasion. Until the author stumbled across a box of correspondence at the British National Archive, the identity of the killer remained unknown—to all but her stricken father, who pursued his own investigation through his last days, and to a few British foreign service offers who ignored him.

Unlike most of the city that it presided over in 1937, Fox Tower has survived into the present day, trading bats and demons for contemporary art as the home of Red Gate Gallery. But the rest of the city is nearly unrecognizable. Ever heard of the “badlands”—a broken down slum for pleasure-seekers and ne’er-do-wells, where imperial castaways rub shoulders with dissolute Chinese? Neither have we, though we did have a weird déjà vu feeling the last time we went to Propaganda.

For those of us who know contemporary Beijing, one of the book’s greatest pleasures is to rediscover the city’s cultural geography through the lens of a vanished expat society. The former Foreign Legation quarter, for example, was cordoned off from the rest of the city by eight massive iron gates and watched around the clock by armed guards—and you thought you lived in an expat bubble.

French has labored to present an accurate vision of Peking in 1937. He sketches the motivations and allegiances of his characters with a detective’s eye for detail, reconstructing convincing portraits of real-life White Russian madams, British colonial administrators, and dissolute pleasure seekers, to name a few.

He’s attempting a difficult task—to make historical characters come alive, as they might in fiction, while veering as little as possible from the evidence. The result is that the story is sometimes drier than it might be. Well-documented events, like Pamela’s autopsy, are spelled out in great detail, but off-the-record scenes in the characters’ lives aren’t given as much space. We wish we could have it both ways.

The novel was recently pitched at the Melbourne International Film Festival for possible film adaptation, and we hope this happens—an onscreen version might be the perfect way to heighten the human drama of this thriller.

Find it: Paul French, Midnight in Peking, Penguin Books, US$19.99