Shanghai was known as an "adventurers' paradise" in the 1930s. "True adventurers always go for the risk itself, and all the other profit is supplementary. That's the very origin of the city's vitality. But now the quality is all gone - formatted and institutionalized," he says.

In his novel, the protagonist Weiss Xue finds his Russian jewel-dealer girlfriend Theresa is selling weapons to gangsters and assassins, and a woman he happened to take to the pictures is involved in murder. Hired by the French police, Xue becomes involved in the conspiracy and takes a key role in the hijacking of an armored car. What he later chooses to reveal or cover up will decide the future of the concessions.

File photos featuring the concessions of 1930s' Shanghai, like the one above, offer inspiration for Xiaobai in his new book.

The novel portrays a kaleidoscope of characters and scenes in the concessions. People from all kinds of backgrounds, from various parts of the world, come to try their luck in Shanghai: Expats bored of life at home, an American who tries to erase his fingerprints and thereby his criminal record, a Korean terrorist trained in Russia and much more.

The stories and characters are all fictional, but the historical background and details - from the names of the streets, to the shape of a table lantern - are factual. The author has also added copious footnotes, providing more related information.

The way Xiaobai tells the story it is possible to get bogged down in historical details and vivid descriptions, thereby losing track of the storyline, but the author insists this is because he doesn't want to sacrifice detail for a fast read.

Xiaobai started writing five years ago. His first novel Game Point (Ju Dian), published recently, tells about a group of marginalized people in Shanghai plotting against each other over a 1 million yuan ($151,920) check in the 1980-90s, in the early years of China's reform and opening-up.

That's also when Xiaobai worked for international corporations, founded his own companies, and joined China's first group of voluntary movie translators, providing Chinese subtitles for pirated Western movies.

"It was purely for fun. Nobody got a penny from the work," he says. "Now I'm a player who enjoys reading, observing and thinking. I can live without the royalties from my writing.

"I'm fascinated by narration - how we always hide some information while we tell our stories. Truth is transient - what's past is past. All we have is 'narration'. Once we realize this, narration enters a combat with various versions of the 'truth'."

Xiaobai also worked as a picture editor with the Shanghai Translation Publishing House, including on the latest Chinese edition of American author and literary theorist Susan Sontag's On Photography.

"Images show all kinds of information, lost or neglected by text recording," Xiaobai says.