Growing up in Limerick City in Ireland, I spent every summer holiday at my maternal grandmother’s dairy farm in County Limerick. On the wall of the farmhouse was an old black-and-white studio photograph of a serious young man in a formal suit, accompanied by four young Chinese men in silk robes. This was my great-uncle, I was told, my grandmother's brother, who along with a second brother, served as Sub-Inspectors in the Municipal Police in Shanghai, China in the 1920s.

As a child I spent many hours staring at this photograph and imagining the adventures my granduncles must have had.  Thirty years later, I found myself living in Sydney, Australia, working in the international education sector and teaching students from Shanghai. I began taking frequent trips to Asia, and grew to love the exciting energy of the major cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Kobe and Singapore.

To research the novel I travelled to Brandeis University, Boston where the top secret files of the Shanghai Municipal Police Special Branch are kept on microfilm since they were smuggled out of Shanghai by the CIA in 1949. 

All characters appearing in ‘Gangsters of Shanghai’ are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Burleigh Castle and its occupants exist only in my imagination.

The major background events in the novel are entirely accurate, no matter how outlandish they may appear to the reader.  Shanghai between the wars was a strange, exciting and dangerous place.