Alexander Stuart

Anna May Wong. I am currently (August 31, 2012) six days away from the end of my Kickstarter campaign for my novel-in-progress, Chinatown Nights - a noir love story and thriller, set in 1919, that overturns the racial and sexual stereotypes of its day, but which is also very much about NOW. Imagine Blade Runner meets The Maltese Falcon and you will get a sense of the tone I am striving to achieve. This brief extract from the novel is from the end of Chapter Three.  Sam Edmunds, a ne'er-do-well adventurer just arrived in London from New York, has found himself caught up in gunfire at an illicit drinking club run by a powerfully self-made and self-defined Chinese woman, Lady Shao (based on an amalgam of various real-life women of the period, including the wonderful Anna May Wong ) - a woman branded in reality by the sensationalist pictorial press of the day, " The Madonna of the Underworld. " Both Sam and Lady Shao have been interviewed by the police, but