
The Diary of a Drug Fiend
Another novel from the same period fascination with drugs as glamorous and terrifying.
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by Sax Rohmer
A sensational 1919 crime novel of cocaine, opium, nightlife, an actress, and London’s shadowy drug world.
Rohmer turns the period fascination with narcotics into a pulpy mystery in which glamour, erotic danger, crime, and racialized fear share the same nightlife.
An investigation enters London’s drug world through cocaine, opium, nightlife, theatrical glamour, and concealed crime.
Rohmer makes cocaine, opium, nightlife, glamour, and forbidden danger the machinery of a sensational crime story.


Another novel from the same period fascination with drugs as glamorous and terrifying.
Read our take

Another period thriller in which bohemian life meets fear and the forbidden.
Read our takeExplore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.

War correspondent who covered the Spanish Civil War, D-Day, and conflicts across five more decades; Hemingway's third wife, 1940–1945.
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American novelist and essayist who left Harlem for Paris at twenty-four with forty dollars, and wrote the books that made him the most quoted witness to race, sex and belonging in twentieth-century America.
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Jamaican-born poet and novelist, and one of the essential writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He arrived in Paris from Moscow in 1923 and stayed in France until 1928, writing Home to Harlem there — and forming a low opinion of the rich, white expatriate scene that dominates most accounts of the period. His Paris is the same years as Hemingway's and almost nothing like it.
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