As I researched the experience, I found accounts of race riots in Britain over a perceived loss of seaman jobs to the Chinese. In Liverpool, at least, there appears to have been a curfew for “alien seamen” after the 1919 riots—and officials who applied the rules to non-seamen as well. Many of the Chinese men married British wives, and these wives were automatically considered aliens upon their marriage. The “yellow peril” stories seem quaint today, and I have no doubt that many were written only because the Oriental mastermind sold books faster than a sexy vampire; but they were hardly innocent.
These things all came together in the Limehouse opium den: drugs, exoticism, and Oriental villainy. Fu Manchu’s secret lair was invariably here. In reality, any opium dens that may have been there had died out by the turn of the century. Drug dealers did exist, but probably no more than anywhere else. The Limehouse opium den itself was largely a myth by the 1920s, perpetuated by the aforementioned “yellow peril” stories and a press anxious for any news that would support the ongoing narrative of the sinister Asiatic corrupting the morals of innocent white women.
I knew none of this when I decided to make Eric Peterkin half-Chinese.
I hadn’t done it with any thought of responding to the “yellow peril.” That ship had not only sailed; it had come back and been dry-docked. Rohmer’s Fu Manchu already had his answer in Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan, and time has reduced the old supervillain to little more than an amusing relic.
I’d done it, perhaps, with an idea of putting more of myself into my creation, without excluding him from all the sorts of stories I want to tell. I’m not half-Chinese; I’m all Chinese. But when I fell in love with the Golden Age detective story, perhaps I also fell in love with the setting and the milieu. I want to send Eric Peterkin off to a succession of country house murders, which could get difficult for a fully Chinese immigrant, given the racial climate of the time.
Singapore is, in many ways, very British. Modern Singapore was founded as a British port in 1819, and remained under British control until 1963. Life is conducted primarily in English, and a great deal of the political and commercial infrastructure dates back to the old colonial days. At the same time, Singapore is also firmly Asian, with the Chinese forming a powerful majority. The relationship is, perhaps, a little complicated. On the one hand, no one can deny that without the British, Singapore as a political entity simply would not exist; on the other hand, the British were a recognisable “other,” a foreign colonial master. Looking into the mirror, we feared losing ourselves, and the result was a backlash against becoming too westernised. Meanwhile, we spooned Bovril onto our rice congee, and we drank bird’s nest soup in hopes it would help with our GCSEs. We traded oranges at Chinese New Year over dishes of Indian curry and Malay desserts while Duncan Watt read us the English news.
(On a weeklong visit to the UK in 2017, one of the first things I did was pick up a jar of Bovril—the real stuff, thick and black and gooey—which I proceeded to make into beef tea every night. Dear Canada, Bovril is not beef stock: it’s a liquefied cow, and that sloshing bottle on your grocery store shelf is not the same thing at all.)
Growing up in that milieu, I felt a little caught out between the two cultural identities. I’d developed a certain Anglophilia, even as I was encouraged to embrace my ethnically Chinese heritage. Perhaps Eric Peterkin’s biracial status is as much a reflection of this culture clash as it is a pragmatic attempt to project myself into one of the Golden Age’s country house parties. Whatever the case, it’s made him a permanent “other,” an outsider whether he’s in London or Hong Kong. His world is somewhat less welcoming than the one I’ve been blessed with, and one can only hope that he, like Poirot, will in time be able to turn his otherness to his advantage.
In other respects, I like to think that Eric Peterkin follows in the footsteps of the fictional detectives I’ve always admired. I’ve always favoured the puzzle-type mysteries of the Golden Age, as I think this discourse should have made clear already. These tended to have quirky detectives who relied on their brains far more than their brawn, so it goes without saying that Eric Peterkin’s chief asset should be his intellect. But … I will admit that I wanted to move away a little bit from that intellectual infallibility as well. I made Eric young, brash, and impulsive—qualities more generally associated with the Watson than the Holmes in any detective–sidekick pairing.
He’s far from infallible, but he’ll always know exactly who the murderer is when he begins his summation. That is a promise.
So there’s my detective. And there’s the world I’m throwing him into: a world streaked by the shadows of the war that separated it from the age before, and determined to live in rejection of the darkness. It’s more than just art deco architecture (which technically doesn’t exist until 1925, a year after the story) and drop-waisted flapper frocks. It’s the passing of an age, and life in the aftermath. It’s a rising awareness and a need to deal with things that had never been problems before. I don’t think exoticism and the romanticisation of the foreign is new, but it’s there … and always will be.
This is not an era I’ve ever lived in, and it fascinates like a sailor’s first foreign port. The unexpected details surprise and delight. I don’t think I can ever fully understand everything about it without a time machine, but I like to think that I’ve come some way closer to understanding a part of it—gotten a bit closer to the heart of the era, beyond the trappings thereof … made of it more than mere exoticism.
At the heart of any mystery, I think, is a desire to understand … to get to the heart, from which all the trappings flow. And that is more than just a game.
HISTORICAL NOTES
The Britannia Club is, of course, a fictional establishment, as is the Arabica coffeehouse. Sotheby Manor, the Butterworth Arms, the Hammer and Anvil, the Green Elephant inn, the churches of St. Tobias and St. Julian, Brolly’s music hall, and the village of Wexford Crossing are also fictional. The town of Barchester and the county of Barsetshire are an homage to Anthony Trollope.
I don’t actually know if the town of Chichester had a motor coach service to the surrounding villages during the First World War and the years following. This was a necessary fabrication for plot-related purposes. The hospitals mentioned—Graylingwell and the Royal West Sussex—did indeed exist, but are no longer. Graylingwell’s last psychiatric inpatients were moved out in 2001, and its buildings were sold to developers in 2010. The Royal West Sussex was closed in 1972 following the commissioning of the new St. Richard’s Hospital, and its building became part of a housing development. I will admit that the presence of a morgue in the Royal West Sussex is only a guess on my part, but I believe it to be a reasonable assumption.
I continue to be fascinated by the architecture of Chichester Cross.
Netley Hospital, also known as the Royal Victoria Hospital, fell into gradual decline after the Second World War. It was damaged by fire in 1963 and demolished in 1966.
The Golden Lion pub still operates on King Street. However, the St. James Theatre was pulled down in 1957, despite organised protests and campaigns led by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. A modern office building, without a neoclassical facade, now stands in its place.
A new facility for the newspaper archives in Colindale was completed in 1932, allowing people to consult them directly without the papers’ having to be delivered to the British Museum. Until then, these deliveries were made just once a week. I have taken liberties with just exactly when in the week the deliveries might have been made, allowing Eric Peterkin the convenience of consulting the Sussex newspapers within a day or two of his wanting them. Today, the archives are digitised, and what might once have taken weeks to discover can now be found after a few minutes of an internet search.
I’m only guessing, based on a plan of the British Museum from the 1930s, that public access to the Newspaper Reading Room was from the side entrance on Montague Street.
The Shafi was a real Indian restaurant,
opening its doors in 1920. It was not the first of its kind, though by the 1940s it had become something of a social hub for London’s Indian community.
While opium dens did exist in Limehouse in the 1870s, they’d been stamped out by the turn of the century. By 1924, Chinatown’s reputation for drugs and gambling would have been largely unfounded, perpetuated only by the romantic imaginations of the press and a general suspicion of the Chinese. Following the bombings of the Second World War, London’s Chinatown moved out of Limehouse and westward to the area around Gerrard Street. The reputation for opium dens does not appear to have followed it.
The British Broadcasting Company was a commercial venture, unlike the British Broadcasting Corporation we know today. The Company was dissolved in 1926, and its assets transferred to the Corporation.
MI1b was merged with the Navy’s Room 40 team in 1919 to form the Government Code and Cypher School. The GCCS would be housed at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, where its crypto-analytical work would once again prove invaluable. One presumes that the upgraded accommodations helped as well.
Mention is made of the art deco aesthetic. In fact, the name would not come into use until the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925, one year after the events of this novel.
Both Shell Shock and Its Lessons and Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses are real texts, representing the birth of studies into what we now call PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. At the time, it was unlikely to have been understood at all by the ordinary civilian. While many soldiers might have recognised something different about themselves or their mates—common tendencies towards certain behaviours, for instance—I doubt if they’d have really understood it either.
It should go without saying that all the weather effects are entirely my invention, with no regard either to how weather patterns work or to what the weather actually was in the various places described at the dates and times mentioned.
It should also go without saying that all the characters of the story are fictional. Mention has been made of certain real-life figures, however: John Archer, Philip Bowden-Smith, Sax Rohmer, Wilfred Owen, Field Marshall Douglas Haig, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Hobbs, Sigmund Freud, Lady Astor, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and, of course, King George V.
King George V felt very strongly that the Victoria Cross, once given, should never be taken away. While the mechanism for its forfeiture remains in place, no Victoria Cross has been forfeited since 1908.
GRAND PATRONS
Allen Taylor Garvin
Barnaby Conrad III
Calvin L. Fobrogo
Charles Roburn
Claire Turbide
Clara Ow Sui-Foon Brady
D. Caplin
Daphne Brunelle
Dave and Linda’s Mom
David C. Liu
Elizabeth E. L. Lim
Ezandra Chang
Faith Allington
Jiak Cheng Nah and
Steven Chua
John C Wiens
Julie Sng
Leslie K. Hendrickson
Lily Kaye Fox
Margaret Ow
Mary Kurian
Mary Ryan
Mike Donald
Phillip Lee
Pierre Phaneuf
Roger Richmond-Smith
Seng Chong Wong
Shin Koon Ting
Sin-Eng Siow
Sock Gek Goh
Stirling Westrup
T K Goh
Ten Eng Lee
Terence Lim
Thomas Nguy
Victor Huang
Wojciech Sawicki
Yin Han Siow
The Knights of Columbus,
Council 284
The Knights of Columbus,
Council 15491
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