CITY OF DEVILS
The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai
Paul French
Picador
299 pages; $28
Shanghai in the 1930s. Anyone familiar with detective novels or noir cinema knows exactly what that phrase means: Smoke-filled nightclubs, back-alley gambling houses and dark, seedy opium dens, all frequented by a motley assortment of Chinese mobsters, White Russian émigrés, fugitive criminals of all nations and at least one gorgeous femme fatale with a past. Designated an international treaty port after the 19th-century Opium Wars, Shanghai eventually became a kind of global melting pot of the Seven Deadly Sins — what one writer called “a
