Beijing Postcards Bookclub: The History of A Murder Investigation

Undertaking a police investigation is also a kind of historical research. In the files attention will be directed at small details, habits and routines that are often difficult to connect with through other sources. The Pamela Werner murder case from 1937 is no exception. 

Over the next two months, the Beijing Postcards Bookclub will take on not one but two books about the murder - Paul French’s international bestseller Midnight Peking and Graeme Sheppard’s A Death in Peking. They both deal with the case and draw upon a whole lot of overlapping sources, but the two authors reach very different conclusions.

Beijing Postcards have also conducted our own research into the case. Most notably we have uncovered both Chinese police reports and newspaper articles that have not previously been utilized in any of the books.

In our Book Club discussion we will of course address the question “Who Killed Pamela?” but the investigation is also an amazing tool allowing us to penetrate deep in to the mindset people living in Republican Beijing just before the Japanese occupation.

Find archival materials related to this murder case on our Who Killed Pamela Project Page.

BookClub Weekly Update

Episode 1: Where was Pamela Werner’s body found?

On January 8 1937 Pamela Werner was brutally murdered, but where? Paul French and Graeme Sheppard have different ideas on where Pamela’s body was found, one says at the foot of the infamous fox tower, the other inside the old inner city close to the German cemetery.

Episode 2: What was the last thing Pamela saw before she died?

A hundred years ago optography - a new "technique" that could allegedly extract the last image a deceased person had seen before death - was being tested in murder cases across the world. The infamous Pamela Werner case in Beijing was no exception.

Episode 3: The Mysterious Mr. Prentice

What role did the dentist Wentworth Prentice play in the Pamela Werner murder case? Graeme Sheppard believe that Prentice involvement was only a product of a distraught father’s imagination, but Paul French on the hand think that it was probably the mysterious Mr.Prentice that committed the brutal crime.