The Ballad of a Small Player

Lawrence Osborne

A middle-aged English solicitor, of low to middling class, has embezzled a fortune from an elderly widow and stashed his ill-gotten wealth in oriental accounts. Now, hiding out in Macau, a forgotten rock in the South China Sea, under the assumed moniker, ‘Lord Doyle’, he proceeds to gamble away his days and nights, living a lifestyle of champagne cocktails and yellow kid gloves and slowly squandering everything he has struggled to steal on unskilled games of punta banca baccarat. And all good things must come to an end.

Luckily — as this is a novel about many things but principally about the fickle nature of fortune — Dao-Ming strays into his life just has he hits bottom. She bails him out of an enormous unpaid restaurant bill, offers him sanctuary and sustenance on her Hong Kong island home of Lamma, and finally, impossibly, changes his luck.