Who were Maurine Karns and Pat Patterson?
I don’t have much information on this strange duo, but the fact that in 1936 they published a guide to Shanghai that’s one of the most cherished (and fun) pieces in my collection.

The book (which was reprinted a few years ago by always reliable Earnshaw Books) is called Shanghai – High Lights, Low Lights, Tael Lights.
And it is absolutely outrageous.
In a good way, mind you!

In 1936, Karns and Patterson set out to compile a guide to the seamier, most debauched side of Shanghai – a town that was both known as the Paris of the Orient and the Whore of the Orient.
So, ok, let’s say Karns and Patterson focus on the latter.

The street is filled with the animal life indigenous to such surroundings, taxi-hustlers, procurers, beggers, Russians willing-to-reveal-the night-life, ricsha coolies, massage house steerers, stolid Annamite policemen and optimistic sharpshooters of every stripe and hue. Sailors, marines and occasional civilians of every nationality wander, teeter and finally stagger from place to place, pausing only now and then to punch each other on the nose as the occasion demands.

This is a sort of companion to the Standard Guide Book I mentioned a few days back.
A twisted, disreputable, gin-soaked companion, but a companion nonetheless.
There, you can find the addresses of every consulate, newspaper and essential office.
Here, you get a quick introduction to sing-song girls, no-class dives and watering holes, gambilng dens etcetera.

It is very strong the impression that Karns and Patterson got through a drinking binge in Shanghai one weekend, and when they woke up, hung-over and bleary-eyed, there was this book there they had written while intoxicated.
The book is anything but politically correct.
The only consolation is, it’s as offensive to the Chinese as it is to Christian Missionaries.

And yet, it is fun.
Sort of.

And there is a single page, the very last-but-one page of this booklet, which has been running round what’s left of my brain these nights I spent writing. It goes like this…

One more thing before closing — something that might be termed “the Shanghai Illusion.” Many otherwise intelligent people, misled by gaudy fiction on the East and by wacky movies produced by directors whose ideas of China were garnered in midwestern chop suey joints, conceive it to be an eerie place peopled with sinister Orientals, embittered remittance men slowly going to hell, gin sling in hand, and painted adventuresses casting spells whilst murmuring cynical epigrams (Marlene Dietrich-style). Well, women paint and cast spells in Shanghai (just as they do in Snyder Falls, Vermont) and men drink and go to hell (and return) and it’s rumored about that there are a few Chinese in the town. But as the incipiently-disappointed believers in such yarns find out, all of this is but part of “the Shanghai illusion” and is as phoney as a Hollywood opium den.

Now isn’t it lucky I write fantasy?