Not dead and buried

On a bitterly cold night in 1937, a beautiful British teenager, Pamela Werner, was found lying murdered beside the Fox Tower in Beijing. The killing sent shockwaves through the city, but as the second world war loomed and then broke out, the case was put away, unsolved and forgotten.

Now, 75 years later, historian Paul French has retraced the detectives' footsteps. With the publication of his new historical novel, Midnight in Peking, French has given Pamela a form of belated justice - something she was denied for so long.

He first read of Pamela's story in American journalist Edgar Snow's biography. She was the 19-year-old daughter of Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner, a former British consulate general and old China hand. Intrigued, he headed to the newspaper archive in London's British Library.

'As soon as I got hold of her pictures, she became a person to me,' French says. 'She had her whole life ahead of her, but someone stepped in, murdered her and moved on without getting arrested or convicted.'

Reports written at the time by two British and Chinese police inspectors led French to a few suspects among the then-3,000-strong foreign community living in Beijing's Legation Quarter and Badlands. They included Pamela's father, American dentist Wentworth Prentice, and a member of a Russian criminal underclass, known as 'Pinfold'.

The first two men were part of Legation Quarter's high society, and well-documented in photos, memoirs and newspaper reports. But finding information about 'Pinfold', who lurked in the crime-and-drug-infested Badlands, proved difficult. 'It was an area nobody wanted to admit existed,' French says. 'Little was known about the low life, driftwood and underworld.'

However, French had a stroke of luck after tracking down some of Pamela's former schoolmates, who are now in their 90s. The elderly women provided him with interesting gossip about the case. 'Official accounts don't tell you what was being whispered in the clubs and schoolrooms of the time - the false allegations, the assumptions, and the fear,' he said.