Review: If Mickey Spillane Wrote One Last Book, this Would Be It!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 2, 2013
There are few stories I love better than mystery-thrillers set in Shanghai during the 1920s. Gerry O'Sullivan's "Gangsters of Shanghai" satisfies. Plus, with an opening sentence like "The severed head of a young man had been squeezed into a bamboo birdcage and hoisted on a pole above the Nantao market place" I knew this was bound to be a rollicking read.Mikie Gallagher is the hard-boiled detective tasked with solving the mystery of the head in the birdcage. But, like any good detective story, that would turn out to be just the tip of the iceberg, on this, the most dangerous police beat in the world. Gallagher comes to China to escape the Troubles in him Irish home, but also to find out the truth about his true love's fate. His investigation leads him to the House of Multiple Joys, a racketeer called Big Ears Lu, and no end to Gatsby-esque jazz clubs and opium dens.But for me, the best part of the book was knowing that author O'Sullivan had based the main character and much of the story on his own granduncle who really was a detective inspector in the Shanghai Municipal Police in the 1920s. Well researched (he uncovered the actual files of the Shanghai police at Brandeis University, where they'd been kept on microfilm after they were smuggled out of China by the CIA!) and accurately written, the scenes felt pulled directly from old photos from the times.If you're a fan of Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett, or any of the Thin Man movies, you're gonna love this book.