Fan-Tan is set in and around Hong Kong in the 1920s. Annie Doultry (a man, named after the French writer Anatole France) lies in Hong Kong Island's Victoria prison, guilty of selling a small part of the consignment of arms he was carrying as a ship's captain. (By Hong Kong law it was legal to carry armaments through Hong Kong waters but not to sell them there). He watches Chinese prisoners perform the Hard Labor Number 1, a punishment apparently never given to Europeans at that time. They had to walk in a circle, picking up a 24-pound cannonball from one pyramid and depositing it on the next. Any failures were punished on the spot with the lash (the book is throughout notably anti-British).
He also watches, through his cell window, a man being hanged. This man, convicted of piracy, in his last moments of life denounces another prisoner as one of the biggest pirates on the South China coast. Doultry goes to the prison authorities and testifies that the man thus accused had been an honest cook in his employment. As a result the intended charges are dropped.
When he is released from jail, Doultry starts by getting his own back on the man who informed on him in the first place, and then, through contact with the man he has saved by his fictitious prison testimony, joins forces with the notorious and very real pirate, Madame Lai Choi San. Their escapades, culminating in the discovery of a fabulous cache of extremely
valuable pearls, combine with typhoons, Macau casinos (fan-tan is a Chinese gambling game where contestants bet on the number of buttons under an upturned cup) and triad initiations -- swallowing the heart of a beheaded cockerel, and so on -- to make the suitably exciting tale the publishers are now offering to the public.
And Marlon Brando? His 1994 memoir Songs My Mother Taught Me doesn't once mention Cammell. But in his later life his mind must have been taken up by many more worrying matters than an abandoned film project, notably the trial of his son Christian for murder.
Thomson, who appears to go out of his way to stress Brando's involvement throughout, does have one sardonic comment, however. "It is not an uncommon fantasy among Hollywood's great," he writes, "to think they could be writers if only they had the time, patience, a pen, or the spelling."
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