Others have stated that the book is dry, byzantine and a teases around a fascinating narrative without delivering. I find these charges to be unfair.

The book appeals to those who have a working knowledge of the Old Shanghai. So if you don't have a background, I suggest Stella Dong, J.G. Ballard or at a minimum Steven Speilberg's movie EMPIRE OF THE SUN before attempting this book.

What is lacking in this book is informative city maps of Old Shanghai. I would liked more photographs of the persons and places that populate the book. As a result, I am having to refer back to Tales of Old Shanghai website to find the Shanghai landmarks much less the Argentine Club. Forget about getting pictures of the smaller names mentioned in the book i.e. Berrier, Erhadt, Otani and Sorge. Some more references to NORTH CHINA DAILY were notably missing. Also missing is offical papers from Wang Ching Wei, Pu Yi, Mao Tse Tung and Chiang Kai Shek's Tai Li. Thier story which becomes the larger story is hinted at but not explored in the shadow of the Old Players.

The role of the White Russians and Jews are brought to light. The book hints that the Shanghai Jews may have had more substantial links to the Soviets, but yet Wasserstein does not explore this fully. And where is the Comintern in all of this? He does concede that the Russians as well as the British have been less forth coming.

All in all a fantastic book that should be used in conjunction with other references to support serious scholarship.

Too many forget, for example, that Shanghai, rather than Hong Kong or Singapore, was the Britain's commercial jewel in the crown in East Asia. In the 1930's Shanghai was the world's sixth largest city, and cleared over half of China's foreign trade. Major British companies like Jardine Matheson, Swires, and the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank were based there, and the government of the International Settlement was firmly in British hands.

Shanghai was also a seething pit of human corruption. Crowded with opium godowns, Chinese warlords and gangsters, and White Russian émigré "taxi-dancers". Such was the venality of the place that it was estimated that one in every thirteen women worked as a prostitute.

It was also a place where the intelligence services of half a dozen nations vied for information and influence. It is this world, and what became of it under Japanese occupation, which has been chronicled by Wasserstein in his very interesting book.

As Japan flexed its muscles in China in the late 1930's Britain felt itself increasingly powerless to protect its interests in the International Settlement. The collapse of France and Italy's entry into the war in 1940 left it with only the US as a friend in the International Settlement. The city capitulated within days of Japan's entry into the war.

The intelligence war had been going on for much longer of course. While the extensive apparatus maintained by Britain to gather intelligence during the interwar years is interesting, what is of more focus for the book is the efforts of the Axis powers, but particularly Japan, to build and maintain intelligence networks, and the targets of their collection activities.

The Japanese and Germans also undertook extensive propaganda operations, which would not have been possible without cooperation and outright collaboration by Allied nationals, and others such as Indians and White Russians.

Indeed, it is the broad tale of cooperation and collaboration which is the centerpiece of this book. Wasserstein identifies and analyses the people who assisted the occupying powers, and their motives for so doing. Some, like the Australian Alan Raymond, were opportunistic members of the criminal underworld of Shanghai. Others, like the Eurasian sometime Briton Lawrence Kentwell, were motivated by a mix of manic obsession with perceived injustices and a claimed racial bias. There were also Chinese and Russian gangsters and even a nymphomaniac Indian "princess" described in postwar intelligence reports as "physically intimate with both sexes concurrently....[and known to] run the gamut of perversion, since she has also been known to be both sadistically and masochistically inclined."

Wasserstein also looks at the efforts of the Allied powers to run intelligence and sabotage operations in Japanese occupied territories, and examines the reasons for their failure. Many of these revolved around poor organisation, and the nefarious ploys of their Chinese allies.

All in all, this is a well researched work, but with a highly readable, almost racy style. It does much to shed light on the motives and methods of cooperation and show what happens when a city becomes subject to occupation.

Events elsewhere overtook all the participants in Shanghai's secret war, but Wasserstein ensures their exploits are not forgotten.