Hot on the heels of news that Peter Hessler has had to cancel his Literary Festival appearance, we learn that Australian author Robert Dessaix is also unavailable. His session this Sunday afternoon (March 7, 3pm) is to be filled by Shanghai's own Paul French. (Updated program available here.)

From French's blog:

The Down and Dirty Secrets of Seedy Shanghai and Perverted Peking

We've had the glamour, we've had the politics – now it's time for the secret and sordid history of the foreign criminal underworld of Shanghai and Peking in the first half of the twentieth century. Pimps and pros; gangsters and gamblers – from Shanghai's ‘Line’ and its notorious luxury bordellos full of ‘American Girls’ to the illegal casinos of the Badlands; the sexual-sadist cults of Peking's Legation Quarter to the secret cabarets of the Tartar City – foreigners were mad, bad and depraved on a scale few can imagine. They murdered and robbed, procured and pimped in a haze of drugs, sex and debauchery.

Paul French tells the largely hidden tales of the underworld that include murder, gun fights and easy money based on his forthcoming trilogy of books that aim to reveal the largely previously ignored lower depths of low life foreign China. Not for the easily shocked or the legally upstanding.

Paul French is the author of various books including Carl Crow – A Tough Old China Hand: The Life, Times and Adventures of an American in Shanghai and Through the Looking Glass: China's Foreign Journalists From Opium to Mao. He is currently completing the first in his low life trilogy – A Peking Murder – a dramatic investigation into the previously unsolved and horrific murder of a young English woman in 1937 Peking to be published by Penguin Books in 2011.

For more of Chinatravel.net's coverage of this year's Literary Festivals in China, click the links below:

China Literary Festivals in March: Programs, ticket info, and travel-related highlights
Writing a guidebook to China: An interview with Rough Guide author David Leffman
Queer Culture in China: An interview with Professor John Erni
Foreign memoirs of China: An interview with Amy Sommers
The History of Photography in China: An interview with Terry Bennett
Shanghai International Literary Festival Preview: Andrew Field