Sax Rohmer - The Daughter Of Fu Manchu

[andydecker]

Oct 21, 2020 21:00:07 GMT helrunar said:

This sounds like an interesting anthology of essays about Sax Rohmer.

www.blackgate.com/2015/11/15/approbation-and-obloquies-for-the-lord-of-strange-deaths/

I definitely share Bill Maynard's feelings of frustrations around attempts to write about Rohmer's work in the 21st century. Often feels like an exercise in pure futility.

cheers, Helrunar

Thanks for the link, Steve. I share Maynard's view. The list is endless; don't read Raymond Chandler's Farewell my Lovely without the proper hand-wringing because of his description of 1940s black ghetto in L.A.

This book seems to be hard to get in country. Guess I will put it on the want list. Rohmer is an interesting topic. His Brood of the Witch-Queen is still one of my top  10 horror novels.

[helrunar]

Today (15 February) was Sax Rohmer's birthday (Feb. 15, 1883).  Bill Maynard published this excellent short essay about Rohmer four years ago:

dmrbooks.com/test-blog/2019/1/25/sax-rohmer-under-the-spell-of-the-supernatural

Bill told me today that another Rohmer short story anthology is in preparation. That will be very nice to see.

Hel.

[helrunar]

This morning I finished Sax Rohmer's final novel of his illustrious career (which spanned over half a century), Emperor Fu Manchu. This is one I had only ever read once, back circa 1974, and I still have the original Fawcett paperback publication I'd found in a used bookshop somewhere--memory says on a trip with my parents to Palm Beach Florida, but that could be erroneous. I'd always badger them to let me have a toddle through any bookshop we'd happen upon in our holiday trips, and they were very indulgent. My sister of course found it all very boring.

The year is 1959, and Nayland Smith sends mixed-blood (Anglo-Chinese) Captain Tony McKay into the depths of Red China on a mysterious mission. As the blurb announces: 

ARCH-CRIMINAL OF THE WORLD

He had a brow like Shakespeare, a face like Satan, cat-green eyes that gleamed like emeralds. He had the mind of a genius and the cold heart of a serpent.
His power and cunning were endless.
Nothing could stop him--for he was Dr. Fu Manchu.
And now he had created the dreaded Cold Men, a living-dead army of bloodless men who were slaves to his every whispered command.

I began re-reading this one for the first time a few years back, but stalled because the writing style and situations in the early chapters seemed so blatantly un-Rohmer. I corresponded briefly with Bill Maynard about this. He speculated that Rohmer's wife, who collaborated with him on a few of his late period books, may have written a lot of this one. But the style sometimes doesn't even sound like her, at least as represented in her one published novel, Bianca in Black (1958), which I own and have read. So I speculate that a friend, or possibly an actual ghost-writer, worked on this. In the later chapters there are parts that do sound more like Sax Rohmer's actual writing, and one possibility is that he wrote quite a bit but then became ill and was unable to get on with the work. An ironic note is struck when Nayland Smith informs McKay: "Dr. Fu Manchu has no more use for Communism than I have for Asiatic 'flu." Rohmer's death was reportedly the result of a bout of that flu.

This is, at least in some segments, by far the pulpiest of all the Fu Manchu books, and would have been a candidate for one of those "manly men" book subscription clubs as the action occasionally gets into Ian Fleming terrain. (It's obvious, btw, that Fleming himself was heavily influenced by Sax Rohmer.) The zombiesque Cold Men would have been right at home in a horror pulp:

As Nayland Smith sprang forward, the Cold Man turned, a murderous grin on its face.
"Oblige me by stepping aside, gentlemen," General Huan cried in a tone of command.
Both twisted around, astounded by the words and the manner.
General Huan thrust himself before them. The necropolite plucked a knife from his loincloth. And at that same moment the long, curved blade of the great sword whistled through the air--and the grinning head rolled on the rug-covered floor. The trunk collapsed slowly, then slumped over.
"See," General Huan held up the blade. "No more blood than if one carved a fish. The creatures are not human."

Once I had gotten past the early chapters, which had a pace and style of voice that wasn't working that well, I really got into this one, and I thought it was an effective farewell to the series. In one scene, the Devil Doctor muses over the tortures he had made use of in his early years--the Wire Jackets and the Six Gates of Joyful Wisdom (recalled here as the Seven Gates, which seems to suggest that Rohmer or his assistant did not make time to look back over the actual text of The Devil Doctor)--and tells Nayland Smith: "I had to deal with enemies on a higher social and intellectual plane. Therefore, more subtle means were indicated." Drugs, hypnosis and emotional blackmail feature amongst the subtle means, but when things get dicey, the good Doctor becomes more desperate and the result is a rampaging zombie army on the loose. 

Emperor Fu Manchu is in print in an edition published by Titan Books in 2015 in both electronic and physical print formats.

Hel.