Sax Rohmer - The Daughter Of Fu Manchu

[franklinmarsh]

[quote author="andydecker" source="/post/43891/thread" timestamp="1431632633The current edition by Titan Books is quite nice. I was tempted to buy them. A small marvel that they did a re-issue considering how bad-mouthed Rohmer as a writer is in some circles.
[/quote]
Picked up a copy of The Mysterious Dr Fu-Manchu in a Titan books reissue - but it has a decent cover and doesn't appear to be been PC'ed in any way at all. It certainly moves at the speed of light. (The Zayat Kiss has been featured). Each chapter so far is a kind of short story on it's own, with terrific titles like The Thing In The Shrubbery. Fabulous stuff. The evil Doc put in a brief appearance early on when Nayland-Smith and Petrie raided the dressing up box to appear as rough sailors to penetrate a Limehouse opium den, and as Petrie confronts him a trap door opens up to plunge him into the Thames. There's killer centipedes (an influence on Ian Fleming?), poisonous moving green mists, an Oriental femme fatale who's taken a shine to Petrie. Just read an extended dream sequence which is kind of a literary acid trip - and our heroes have fallen into the clutches of the Yellow Peril. You just don't know what's going to happen next.

[franklinmarsh]

Jings! Having been diverted by two Black Books, it's back to the fray with this irresistible pulp treasure. Our heroes are doused with hashish.There's a chapter headed 'The Vault' - which involves rejuvenation of the dead. Some more opium. And when Nayland-Smith, Petrie, and Inspector Weymouth are all captured by the dastardly Fu, he forces them to watch through a glass door as a number of stalwart British bobbies are subjected to death by exotic fungi - the first touch of some disgusto bulbous white flora sending them raving mad, then some equally hideous stuff growing on the ceiling releases deadly spores that encase our hapless cops in living shrouds - the mysterious Doctor gets almost emotional (in a lunatic scientist kind of way) at this. I'm nearing the end, and a kind of sadness is beginning to set in already, because I don't want it to.

[franklinmarsh]

Zipes! Almost forgot to mention I did finish The Mystery Of Dr Fu Manchu. It ends on an explosion (no "The world shall hear from me again" unfortunately) - what a cracking adventure.

[ripper]

'Mystery' is my favourite of the Fu Manchu novels that I have so far read. It's pace is unrelenting and the action comes thick and fast.

[helrunar]

Extraordinary how the Vault of Evil seems to hit ALL my weirdie lit-cult fetishes. I started reading the Fu novels in US Pyramid books reprints sometime in the early 1970s. I quickly became obsessed and subscribed to a marvelous zine called The Rohmer Review which explored the mysterious byways of all things Sax. Last year I bought a CD-Rom of all the issues (I never caught up with the early ones) from that battered silicon despatch box outfit in Canada. I've only been able to look at a few of the files alas.

There is a kind of arc to the Fu novels and if I recall correctly, they fall into 3 groups. The first three books are group one. Rohmer took about a decade off (roughly 1917-1928) from writing the stories to explore other themes (he was already really tired of writing about Fu Manchu, I think--similar to the problem Conan Doyle had with Holmes). During this period he did compose a barnstorming adventure novel about yet another diabolical Oriental mastermind, The Golden Scorpion, and the Devil Doctor made a cameo appearance. 

Daughter of Fu Manchu re-launches the series in time for the onset of the Thirties.  Starting here,  there is a true arc which weaves its way from this book through to Island of Fu. There was another break of a few years and then he wrote Shadow of Fu (circa 1948 I believe?) which was adapted from an abortive attempt at a Fu play and largely written, I believe, by his wife and his protege, Cay van Ash, from notes Sax provided. The three of them did a lot of work together in this way during Rohmer's final decade or so.

The final group are Re-enter and Emperor, which originally came out in the US, where Rohmer seems to have spent most of his time from the end of the war till near the time of his death.   I agree with those who have commented that the style of these final books is so different from Rohmer's way of writing that in a recent attempt to re-read Emperor, I came to the conclusion that it was most likely ghost-written by Cay van Ash or another collaborator.  The Sumuru books, for what it is worth, read like pure Sax Rohmer and seem like a completely plausible extension of his later style, which became progressively more terse as he went on.  I believe that starting sometime in the 20s, he began to use a dictaphone--I think that nearly all the later work was dictated out and then typed by assistants.

The original Fawcett's editions of the final Fu tales and the Sumuru books are fun little gems of 1950s quasi-explo paperback publishing. For some reason, apparently the UK editions of the Sumuru novels had changes. I don't know if these were mandated by the author or the publisher. And don't know if the UK editions of the last two Fu books also had changes/censorship.

In the 1970s, there was a posthumous collection, The Wrath of Fu Manchu, which included a novella and two or three magazine-style short stories about the Lord of the Si-fan.  In the US it came out in a DAW paperback, but there was also a cloth edition by one of the fan-oriented small presses.

I personally find Rohmer quite addictive, though I've been off the needle for awhile now. There's just something loopily FUN about the books even as you shrink from the casually expressed racism and jingoist slang. He actually included some really esoteric lore into nearly everything he wrote.  In another thread I will write a bit about some of Rohmer's ventures into occult-themed horror which apparently was where his real interest lay.

Thanks to the gang for another immensely fun thread!

H.

[dem]

That being the case, it's groups one and two most interest me. Have had a copy of Re-Enter ... hanging around doing nothing for ages, but can't be arsed with it, at least, not until I can give the rest of the pre-fifties efforts a good seeing to.

[pulphack]

Hello Helrunar, and welcome! That's interesting, what you say about Rohmer both using ghosts and also truncating his style (or refining, perhaps) because of using dictation. That certainly accounts for the change between the earlier books and 'Re-enter...' which always baffled me and made me think it was written by another hand. I've read one of Cay Van Ash's Holmes-Fu confrontations, and thoroughly enjoyed it - unless he'd changed his style over the 20+ years between the two titles, I'd be surprised if his was the edit/ghost hand on 'Re-enter...' unless he was working from a dictated and therefore more direct draft.

[helrunar]

Hi Pulp Hack,

I believe that somewhere in the Rohmer Review material, I found an article by Cay van Ash about the process that involved him and Elizabeth producing material that was published under Sax's byline. If I recall aright, these were scripts for a radio series for the BBC--might have been a Gaston Max series.  I plan to do more threads/posts about Rohmer as time permits and if I get the chance, I may write something in at least a little more depth about this.

To Dem Bones I am not sure I would bother at all with Re-enter Fu Manchu--I did read it during my Fu phase back in the 1970s but I have absolutely no memory at all of it.   I had some correspondence (which unfortunately seems to have gone the way of all flesh) with William Patrick Maynard, perhaps THE doyen of all things Sax Rohmer today--Mr. Maynard has been writing some new Fu novels which are described as "authorized" by the Rohmer estate.  I asked him about the authorship of Emperor Fu Manchu and he did not agree with my theory that the book was ghostwritten.  But if you compare the style of this and the Sumuru novels, it's clearly two different people.  It's particularly obvious in Fu Manchu's dialogue in the Fawcett books.  He speaks in a completely different way from the style Rohmer had established for the character in the 1930s books.

Sax Rohmer suffered from financial difficulties in his later years.  The State Department intervened at the request of the Chinese govt. and instructed both Doubleday publishers in the US and a film studio (Republic I think it was) not to publish any more books or film any more stories involving Fu.  Reportedly FDR was a huge fan of Rohmer's and the Fu stories.   If you read the stories carefully, Rohmer actually postulated that Fu Manchu was immensely superior to the clueless Europeans and Americans (in President Fu Manchu) who were struggling against him.  In another series, the Abu Tabah stories collected in Tales of Secret Egypt (originally written in the early 1920s I think), there is a similar juxtaposition between the crass, vulgar, clumsy, meretricious Europeans and the suave, sophisticated, and immensely powerful Abu Tabah who consistently gets the upper hand over the whites.

Anyhow sorry to blather on... at one point in my life I was probably way too obsessed with Sax Rohmer and whenever the subject comes up again, I seem simply to haemorrhage prose.

cheers, H.

[pulphack]

That would be great if you get the time - I'd be fascinated to know more about that... It's been years since I read 'Re-enter...' and it just didn't fit with the earlier books at all to my eye, so I think you have a point.

I must admit, I've never understood the opprobrium Rohmer attracted for Fu Manchu - the man is a genius, smarter than any of his adversaries and loses mostly due to the duplicity and stupidity of those around him rather than his own mistakes, and moreover his motives if given to an Occidental hero would be applauded. His aim is to avenge the damage done to his people. He has more in common with the likes of a Doc Savage than, say, a Dr Nikola. It's not about gain for gain's sake - gain is a means to an end, a greater and noble purpose. He's only 'the yellow peril' because he's smart and driven enough to actually beat the real oppressors...

Or at least, that's how I see it when some eejit says to me 'yeah, but ain't that crap racist?' Yeah, mate, but ain't you got a brain...

[andydecker]

Interesting topic. As Marvel's Master of Kung-Fu Omnibus is arriving these days I guess a Rohmer re-read is in order. I often mentioned that his "Brood of the Witch Queen" is in my top 10 of horror novels, but I only read some of the Fu Manchus. About the changing styles, I wouldn't dispute this. But isn't it possible that the Rohmer of 1913 and the Rohmer of 1957 have changed much? Between the first Fu Manchu and the last there were two world wars and tremendous changes in the world.

For instance, compare the early Bloch writing these Mythos tales with the later Bloch working for EQMM or wherever he was published. It seems like a different writer. 

I also don't buy the condemnation of the Fu Manchus being particulary racist. Before WWI and after the Japanese trashed the Russians any asian independence movements could only be seen as a threat to the empire. Therefore Fu Manchu is as natural a villian for a british secret agent of 1913 as are IS today.

[helrunar]

Hi Andy Decker,

I agree that Brood of the Witch-Queen is great fun, and was actually written in part to demonstrate certain occult principles of Egyptian magic, according to Rohmer's statement at the beginning of the book.  My only complaint about the novel is the finale; it feels rather anticlimactic, somehow.  Incidentally, Rohmer himself commented to someone around the time of the release of the 1932 film The Mummy that it was marvelous that people in Hollywood wanted to film his stories, but would have been more appreciative had they actually paid him something for it!

I also recommend a slightly later novel, Grey Face (1920s) which I recall as one of Rohmer's best occult horror novels.  I think it's widely available now on "Kindle."  So many of those ebooks are rife with dreadful typographical errors, alas.

I absolutely agree that Rohmer's literary style evolved.  By the 1930s, the pacing of his narration was much more clipped.  In the work from him dating to the 1950s that I do feel confident in stating was completely his own work, the Sumuru books, you have these racing action passages interwoven with lush descriptive setpieces and the bits where Sumuru interacts with various characters--the latter scenes are written in a very distinctive style.  If you're curious, I did a collage of various lines from the first Sumuru book and posted it as the start of a new thread on the 1940s-50s board here.

If I think of it, I'll grab my copy of Emperor Fu Manchu and post examples of lines that really struck me as impossible to have been written by Sax.  Of course it's all purely subjective but I have been reading his books off and on since around 1973.

For what it is worth, I read the first few issues of the Shang-ch'i book back in the day and I felt it missed the mark as often as hit the target in how the writer did the characters.  Robert Briney who was the editor of Rohmer Review found the fate meted out to Dr. Petrie in the first issue unforgivable, but he told me that he was able to read some of the comics in a French language edition--I forget just how he came by those.  He also read French editions of some of the Fu novels, and perhaps other Rohmer works.  He was a remarkable man.

Best wishes,

Helrunar

[andydecker]

Jun 2, 2016 22:06:27 GMT helrunar said:

Hi Andy Decker,

I agree that Brood of the Witch-Queen is great fun, and was actually written in part to demonstrate certain occult principles of Egyptian magic, according to Rohmer's statement at the beginning of the book.  My only complaint about the novel is the finale; it feels rather anticlimactic, somehow. For what it is worth, I read the first few issues of the Shang-ch'i book back in the day and I felt it missed the mark as often as hit the target in how the writer did the characters.  Robert Briney who was the editor of Rohmer Review found the fate meted out to Dr. Petrie in the first issue unforgivable, but he told me that he was able to read some of the comics in a French language edition--I forget just how he came by those.  He also read French editions of some of the Fu novels, and perhaps other Rohmer works.  He was a remarkable man.

Best wishes,

Helrunar

Yes, the ending of Brood is disappointing. As is the damsel in distress. Must be one of the most passive characters in this genre. I never read this up, but I gather this also was a serialized novel first. The chapters are very fragmented. Still, I like the heroes. Stubborn, reactionary, narrow-minded - but in a tight spot you'd wish them on your side.

I can understand Robert Briney. But most of the first issue of MoKF was already forgotten in the third. Petrie lived on, Smith could walk again, etc. On of the most interesting things writer Moench did was that he wrote Fu Manchu in arcs. Basically you had three arcs over the years. At first the classic Fu Manchu, so to speak, which was rather simple and generic, then the much better James Bond Fu Manchu who wanted to crash the moon on the earth and in the third long arc esoteric Fu Manchu invoking the order of the Golden Dawn. It ended a bit silly with fake UFOs - it was obvious influenced by R.A.Wilsons Illuminatus - , but it was fun.

Also the spy-content worked very well. Smith as a cold war warrior and head of MI-6, untill he gets booted out by a palace-revolt, a still young Fah-Loo-Suee becoming the new head of MI-5, a still young from Fu's immortaility serum Karamaneh watching an old Petrie from the shadows. Moench made much of the originals. So much better then most of other so-called re-imaginings or sequels. Today most of the kung-fu content is silly and frankly a bit boring, at times even prentious and the purple prose could choke one. But on the whole it is one of best series of its era.

[helrunar]

Thanks, Andy.  That's very interesting about the Shang-ch'i book--sorry, my brain flatulates whenever I try to write the title; is it Master of Kung-fu?

I thought I had read up through issue 10 or so but I don't recall the rewrite of the events in the first book.  Then again, my short term memory even for stuff I read or viewed a couple of years ago is nearly non-existent, at this point.  I actually do still have some of the issues I bought way back when--which seems incredible.  I have no idea how or why I hung onto them, since most of the books I owned then were left at home and my Mom either yard-saled them or, eventually I think, bagged them up for rubbish.  She's a lovely lady but she just doesn't like having a lot of books around.  She complains of dust.  Another sign that sometimes one simply cannot fathom the opinions of those we love.

Interesting about Fah Lo Suee becoming the head of MI-5.  I really can't wrap my head around such a development but like her daddy she was exaltingly supreme in her ability to combine drugs and mind control.

Is the book still being published?  With the way things are going, I expect to read one of these days that Shang-ch'i is really a SPECTRE agent or some such nonsense.

btw Fu Manchu appears in the first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen serial by Alan Moore.  I think he made at least a brief appearance in a later installment.  It's more the Fu of the original stories from 1913 than where Sax went subsequently with the character in the 1930s.

For what it is worth, and I'm drawing on memories from 40 years ago here, I thought Fu Manchu's Bride and The Trail of Fu Manchu were the best of all the Fu books.  For some reason The Mask of Fu Manchu which comes in between I found balky and labored and I actually skipped whole chapters of that one.  The Karloff film was great fun of course but had little to do with the book--still, it did have more from Rohmer than was the case with any of the Harry Alan Towers productions in the 1960s.

H.

[andydecker]

Jun 3, 2016 14:52:10 GMT helrunar said:

Thanks, Andy.  That's very interesting about the Shang-ch'i book--sorry, my brain flatulates whenever I try to write the title; is it Master of Kung-fu?

I thought I had read up through issue 10 or so but I don't recall the rewrite of the events in the first book.  Then again, my short term memory even for stuff I read or viewed a couple of years ago is nearly non-existent, at this point.  I actually do still have some of the issues I bought way back when--which seems incredible.  I have no idea how or why I hung onto them, since most of the books I owned then were left at home and my Mom either yard-saled them or, eventually I think, bagged them up for rubbish.  She's a lovely lady but she just doesn't like having a lot of books around.  She complains of dust.  Another sign that sometimes one simply cannot fathom the opinions of those we love.

Interesting about Fah Lo Suee becoming the head of MI-5.  I really can't wrap my head around such a development but like her daddy she was exaltingly supreme in her ability to combine drugs and mind control.

Is the book still being published?  With the way things are going, I expect to read one of these days that Shang-ch'i is really a SPECTRE agent or some such nonsense.

btw Fu Manchu appears in the first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen serial by Alan Moore.  I think he made at least a brief appearance in a later installment.  It's more the Fu of the original stories from 1913 than where Sax went subsequently with the character in the 1930s.

Yes, it is Master of Kung Fu. The first two issues were published as Marvel Special Edition, when it became MoKF they already had made the conceptual changes. The series was cancelled in 1986 after 125 monthly issues. Marvel reprinted most of its comics from the time, but as the tale is told copyright problems with the Rohmer estate prevented a reprint for years. This month it is finally reprinted as a hardcover. I don't know if Rohmer is already in the public domain or the lawyers made a deal.

I have read the Moore. If I recall correctly, Fu never was established by name. only by insinuations. Maybe for the same reasons. 

[helrunar]

When we were corresponding a couple of years ago, Bill Maynard told me that the Rohmer literary estate copyright goes through an outfit called something like the International Society of Authors. I think the royalties are supposed to go to benefit some sort of author's retirement home but that's probably just me hallucinating... my short term memory is really ghastly for this kind of thing.

It is confusing, because the late Harry Alan Towers had reportedly "bought the rights" to Fu and Sumuru... but reading between the lines a couple of years ago, it would seem that Towers only owned the rights to the use of the character names and basic elements of the descriptions. That would explain why the films he wrote and produced lacked any element of the original books apart from the names of Fu, Nayland Smith, Dr. Petrie, Sumuru etc. Even Fah Lo Suee's name was changed to Lin Tang though that may have been because nobody could say Fah Lo Suee without cracking up. For what it's worth, Fah Lo Suee is an actual Chinese phrase with means something like Flowery Dew. In Mandarin pinyin it would be written as Hua lo shui. The transcription Fah Lo Suee reflects a Southern Chinese (Cantonese, most likely) accent. Rohmer gave the translation "Sweet Perfume" in a couple of the books. Rohmer did know a few Chinese people when he was starting out and they gave him some pointers and lore, apparently. Rohmer's personal interests were more in Egyptology, occult history and related terrain.

It's also possible, of course, that Towers filmed the Fu stories as he did because it was much, much cheaper to just do the same very rote scenario five times over than try to film what Rohmer actually wrote in any of the books.  For the record, I did think Don Sharp did a great job on Face of Fu Manchu, and Vengeance (the 3rd one) is a guilty pleasure from way back when.

There are so many ebook editions of certain Rohmer novels floating around now that I wonder just how stringently the copyright thing is enforced. Whoever is policing the estate might be focusing on Fu Manchu.

Best wishes,

Steve (Helrunar)