Sax Rohmer - The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu

[andydecker]

Sax Rohmer – The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu (Methuen, 1913, 308 pages; this edition Pyramid Books, 1965, as The Insidious Dr Fu Manchu)



Cover: Len Goldberg

This has been written about already elsewhere in the Vault, but it deserves its own page.

There has been so much said about Sax Rohmer and his most famous creation, a topic which polarizes. Keep in mind this was originally written and published at the time of the later Sherlock Holmes stories. The story of the evil Chinese super villain was first serialized in the magazine The Story-Teller in 1912. Two years before the Great War, at a time the British Empire still perceived itself as "the empire on which the sun never sets".

Told in a frenetic pace and ticking all boxes of the supposed and cliched "mysterious" Far East it is no wonder it became a success. Rohmer created a formula which still works. Where in today's American action fiction agents stop foreign acts of terror, before WWI Nayland Smith and friends did the same with evil Fu Manchu. The biggest difference may be that His Majesty's agent Smith has gathered a circle of amateur agents instead of a professional strike force and the Devil Doctor isn't as genocidal as your average fictionalized Islamic or domestic terrorist of our time. When Rohmer began writing his tales he like the rest of his audience had the bliss of not knowing what horrors the 20th and the 21st century would produce.

Even after 100+ years this is still an entertaining and suspenseful novel. Characterisation is sketchy and yes, Rohmer's female characters must have been even back then something artificial out of the 19th century. Everything is highly romanticized, you won't read about Nayland Smith bringing out the trash or Fu Manchu ordering out. But everything is drenched in atmosphere and the action never stops. No movie version did the novels justice. The best interpretation of Rohmer's cast may still be the one Marvel comics did in the 70s with its Master of Kung Fu, due to writer Doug Moench and his artistic collaborators.

Pyramid Books in the US started reprinting the series from in the early 60s on. It must have been quite a seller as they did several editions with different covers over the years. The edition presented here with artwork by Len Goldberg is the second one.