Peking. A newspaperman going nowhere fast, a wealthy Wall Street financier who collects Chinese art, the financier's daughter, and her boyfriend all team up for an adventure into the remote interior of North China to acquire rare pieces of Yellow Ming porcelain. Along the way, they encounter bandits, warlords, and duplicitous merchants and a young American educated Chinese mastermind. By book's end, the question of the porcelain is settled after layer upon layer of betrayal and intrigue. As well, the young daughter has ditched her boyfriend and found new life with the reporter.

If this formula sounds familiar to you, then you must have already read the author's series of Mr. Moto books. Because Ming Yellow follows the same development and plot pattern as the Moto books--albeit without Mr. Moto. It is almost as if Ming Yellow was a test run for the subsequent series. Publication history shows that Ming Yellow appeared in print just five months before the first Mr. Moto, No Hero. I'm guessing Marquand also found himself somewhat influenced by Pearl S. Buck and her China novels, particularly The Good Earth, whose description of the blue clad Chinese peasantry spread out across the Chinese landscape, on one hand, and, on the other, channeled like a flowing river through the big cities of China, closely parallels the imagery in Ming Yellow.

Otherwise, as a detective tale and an artifact of the 1930s, the novel still has merit. There isn't much suspense, because the answers to everything are well telegraphed in advance. It is only a matter of seeing which of the multitude of possible routes to the end actually is followed. But somehow you will feel like you are there, in 1930s Peking and the Chinese heartland. Marquand hooks readers early, and keeps them engaged throughout. ( )

This book was ok, but clearly not one of Marquand's best. Rodney Johnson is a journalist living in and reporting from China. At that time, China was a vast country ruled by warlords and bandits. The warlords were "generals" of one kind or another. Anyway, super rich financier, Edwin Newall has come to China seeking rare porcelains. He is accompanied by his daughter, the fabulously beautiful Melvina, or Mel, and his junior partner, Paul Steuben, who is basically the dumb jock type. Steuben is hoping to convince Mel into marrying him.

They run into a "westernized Chinese", Philip Liu, who had gone to missionary school and then graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Liu tells them of a very rare porcelain, Ming Yellow. Only a very few pieces exist and they can be seen and purchased only by traveling into the interior. They go there and negotiate with one of the "generals", General Wu. It seems that Wu is trying to buy the allegiance of a local bandit and will use the proceeds of the Ming Yellow sale to forge the alliance.

But of course there's various kinds of skull duggery, complicated by Steuben's blundering stupidity and by Rodney Jones' attraction to Mel. It's one of those pass-the-time books that is ok, but not great. One problem with it for a reader some 80 years after publication is the racist stereotyping of the Chinese and the Chinese mind. I didn't find it hideously racist like Fu Manchu, but it did get a bit wearying. Perhaps it's just because naked racism has come out into the open again during our current political season. Whatever, I've mostly liked the Marquand books I've read, with the exception of the one he wrote that won him a Pulitzer Prize, the unbelievably boring, The Late George Appley. This, I think might be my least liked of the eight or so other books I've read by Marquand.
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