THE READING RHEUM: THE MYSTERY OF THE SINGING MUMMIES (1936)

 

Though I'm a fan of (and maybe an apologist for) Sax Rohmer's works, I'd never visited either of the two "Yellow Peril pulps" produced by Popular Publications. In 1935 Popular launched THE MYSTERIOUS WU FANG, and the magazine lasted into 1936 for a total of seven issues. Popular pulled the FANG (sorry) and almost immediately issued another Yellow Peril series, DOCTOR YEN SIN. But the SIN came to an end that same year after just three issues. An essay on Pulp.Net alleges that Sax Rohmer's lawyers may have sent Popular a letter of restraint for both serials, claiming that the pulp publisher was stepping on the Fu Manchu brand.

It should be kept in mind that Rohmer's Devil Doctor was doing pretty well in the 1930s. Rohmer revived the Fu series in 1931 and prior to the publication of WU FANG, the British author had produced the seventh in the series, THE TRAIL OF FU MANCHU, which first saw serialization in 1934 within the "slick" upscale magazine COLLIER'S. I've no information about how well either FANG or SIN sold, but if FANG had been selling badly, why bring in a second Asian villain to take his place? One Wiki quote asserts that SIN might have been less "juvenile" than FANG, but without reading the source material I can only note in passing that FANG's heroic opponents included one teenaged boy, whereas there are no juvenile characters in the third and last SIN novel, MYSTERY OF THE SINGING MUMMIES.

Arguably the title is the best thing about the story. Like a lot of pulp titles, the creator seems to be jamming together disparate subjects to make the reader curious enough to wonder, "How the heck can mummies sing?" The explanation for the phenomenon that causes living human beings into mummified creatures, and the auditory sound associated with the phenomenon, is pretty inventive.

Not so much the title character. Author Donald Keyhoe (best known today for UFOlogy books) copies all the dominant surface characteristics of Fu Manchu. He's a polymath who can speak several languages, can master all of the sciences, and can hypnotize almost anyone. According to an article by a Wold Newton writer, the other two issues don't seem to have given Yen Sin any background at all, and he barely has any character beyond being an Asian mastermind. He commands a criminal organization called the "Invisible Empire" (though the cover uses the term "Invisible Peril").Which begs the question-- how "invisible" can your empire be when most of your henchmen are savage "Yellow" brutes, who might find it hard to blend into even a big metropolis in the US.

Possibly Yen Sin gets short shrift because Keyhoe put his greatest effort into the doctor's opponent Michael Traile, "the Man Who Never Sleeps." Due to a failed brain operation, Traile loses the capacity to sleep normally. Only a special yoga technique of relaxation allows Traile to keep from going mad, and not sleeping makes him something of a polymath who fills the late hours with esoteric studies. That said, he's just as flat a character as Yen Sin, and so are all of the supporting characters.       

Keyhoe certainly does not stint on the action; everywhere Traile goes he gets into some running gun-battle. But his crisp prose is somewhat mechanical. I wasn't expecting any of the moodiness of Sax Rohmer here, but I also didn't get the sort of fervid verbal poetry one finds in the purple pen of Norvell "The Spider" Page. In true Fu Manchu fashion Yen Sin gets away in the pages of his final adventure, though probably Keyhoe wrote the story long in advance of the decision to cancel the magazine.

The pulps also had a genius for capturing the uncensored attitudes of the writers and the readers at whom they aimed. But there are no insights here about why there's an eternal race war between Occidental and Oriental-- though Yen Sin's only moment of individuality Yen Sin is a claim that he hates the Japanese as much as the Caucasians. Japanese fifth-columnists play a minor role in MUMMIES, and there are nodding references to the activities of the Axis powers. For what it's worth MUMMIES' antipathy to Germany and Japan is one of the earliest expressions of anti-Axis feeling I've come across in American pop culture. I wasn't really expecting anything on a par with the best of Sax Rohmer, and in a way I'm kind of glad that he's not as easy to emulate as a lot of critics might suppose.                          

INFLUENCE OF ANXIETY

 Response designed for a forum-post, context implicit.

____________

Because you and another poster raised the spectre of influence between the daughter of Sax Rohmer"s Fu Manchu (1912) and the daughter of Ming in FLASH GORDON of Alex Raymond (and all uncredited collaborators), here are my hot takes.

First off, there's no doubt in my mind that Ming derives from Fu Manchu, even though their specific characters are not very similar. The fact that both have disobedient daughters is one big factor, though surprisingly the big thing everyone knows about Princess Aura-- that she falls big-time for studly Flash Gordon-- is not initially a feature of Fu's daughter Fah Lo Suee.   

Now, the element of a female ally of Fu Manchu falling for one of the heroes is a big part of the first two books, published respectively in 1912 and 1916. Fu's beautiful slave-girl Karameneh inexplicably becomes enamored of Doctor Petrie, and thus helps Petrie and his cop-friend Smith out of some jams. In the second book Karameneh even shoots her master to save Petrie, and the only thing that saves her from the devil-doctor's vengeance is that Fu uses his former servant as a bargaining chip to compel Petrie's aid in the third book.

This book, HAND OF FU MANCHU (1917) also introduces Fu's daughter, though she's not given a proper name and is never disobedient to her father's will. Then there's a lacunae of about fourteen years, during which there are no official Fu Manchu novels (though the doctor kind of "guest-stars" in THE GOLDEN SCORPION). DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU debuts in 1931, and here Fah Suee does get a name, and she does seek to wrest control of the Si-Fan from her father. However, she doesn't ally herself to any Englishman. In this and in the subsequent book, she implicitly uses drugs to make a young guy her lover, though there's no sense that she's in love with him.         

The sixth book, BRIDE OF FU MANCHU, again portrays conflict between father and daughter, though not over any romantic alliance of hers. Then finally, in April 1934, Rohmer starts serializing, in Collier's, THE TRAIL OF FU MANCHU, Fah stuns her dad by claiming that she's fallen in love with Fu's worst enemy, Smith. In two or three later books, this romance is mentioned, and at least once Fah helps the heroes out of a fix, but the plot is left hanging by the end of the series.

However, FLASH GORDON debuts in January 1934 and its first arc, in which Aura meets and desires Flash Gordon (even as Ming desires Dale Arden) finishes up in April-- which as noted is pretty much when TRAIL got started.

Of course, Raymond et al could have taken the element of the romantically traitorous daughter from a lot of places other than Rohmer. But Rohmer did use that element, albeit with a slave-girl rather than a literal relation, for whatever that might be worth.  

    

THE READING RHEUM: THE GREEN EYES OF BAST (1920)

 SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I probably read THE GREEN EYES OF BAST some thirty or more years ago, thanks in large part to a series of Pyramid paperback reprints of Sax Rohmer's non-Fu Manchu works. I remember enjoying the novel, but this time around, my main reaction was that Rohmer had a great idea and wasted it in a pedestrian mystery novel.

The viewpoint character of BAST is London journalist Jack Addison, who has had some mostly unspecified experiences in Africa, though not enough to make him one of Rohmer's experts in exotica. He has a professional friendship with Scotland Yard Inspector Gatton, which is the main reason Addison gets in on the ground floor regarding a mysterious murder. This killing has personal ramifications for the reporter, because the victim is a man named Coverly, the cousin of an aristocrat who has become affianced to Addison's true love Isobel. Though Isobel has not yet married her intended, the experienced mystery-reader will anticipate that at some point the competing fiancee will get knocked off, leaving Addison's path to Isobel cleared. But though we don't learn the nature of the murderers for over a hundred pages, Rohmer teases the reader with intimations of a strange female watching Addison at his house. He sees the titular "green eyes" through his kitchen window and finds evidence that some intruder-- apparently female, due to leaving tracks from high-heeled shoes-- vaulted the wall around his house in order to gain access to his grounds.

After that intriguing opening, though, Rohmer fills lots of pages with dull ratiocinative exchanges between Addison and Gatton about the investigation, and those exchanges aren't helped by the dullness of both characters. Addison unknowingly encounters the green-eyed woman a couple of times, but Rohmer doesn't make her a compelling character either. Not until about page 90 does Addison meet the prime mover involved in both the murder and the mystery of the green-eyed female athlete. Doctor Damar Greefe is a Eurasian physician, ostensibly in service to one of the Coverly family, and like many of Rohmer's Oriental masterminds he is brilliant, reserved, and obsessed with an idee fixee.

The great idea Rohmer wastes is based on this folklore-notion that pregnant women can have their offspring affected by seeing certain animals. As the online Brittanica puts it:

An old wives’ tale that exists in several cultures suggests that when a pregnant woman looks at an unpleasant or ugly animal, her baby will take on a resemblance of that animal. 

As Greefe informs Addison and Gatton at the novel's close-- given that even by then they're nowhere near solving any mystery-- he, being a "hybrid" between white and not-white parents, became fascinated with evolutionary hybrids. In Egypt he found evidence of children born with animal-like characteristics, and his rationale, knowing that they were not sired by actual animals as in folklore, was to suppose that such people were "psycho-hybrids." He happens to be on hand when a British matron in Egypt gives birth to one such hybrid, after having met one of the strange wildcats that prowls around the long-deserted Temple of Bast, the Egyptian cat-goddess. Greefe tells the matron and her spouse-- two elder members of the Coverly family-- that the delivery is stillborn, when in fact Greefe absconds with the infant, precisely because she is one of the hybrids he's obsessed with, with cat-like eyes and cat-like reflexes. When the girl has matured, Greefe takes her to London so that he can blackmail her high-society parents. But during that sojourn, the cat-woman-- named Nahemah after a Jewish demon-- sees Addison from afar and falls in love with him. 

There's other stuff about who killed who and for what reason, but it's dull stuff. Nahemah, who being the "monster" behind the scenes ought to be the story's imaginative center, never comes alive. Does she regard Greefe as a father, before he informs her of her parentage? Rohmer tells us that she conceives a hatred for the Coverlys, knowing that she was denied her patrimony, but there are no scenes in which she directly interacts with any of her blood relations. Rohmer treats her as if she's absorbed the purported tendency of Eastern women to fall in love quickly, even though she's entirely English. And at no time does Rohmer give her the tragic air he bestows upon a superior character like Fah Lo Suee.

Greefe is easily the novel's most interesting character. In some ways, he's "Fu Manchu Lite." Greefe comes to London with a mute Negro servant armed with a strangling-cord and sets up a weapon with which he can shoot poison gas shells at anyone who gives him trouble! Yet Greefe, unlike the usual penny ante pulp villains, has a genuine beef with the two cultures that spawned him, both of which have rejected his very existence. In one of the book's better scenes, Addison interviews a London pub-crawler regarding the physician, whom the bigoted local calls "the black doctor." For once, a Rohmer protagonist openly scorns this ugly chauvinism. Yet at the same time, the author is still getting some mileage out of the fear of insidious Orientals invading jolly old England.

I don't have a good chronology for Rohmer's published works, but one point of interest is that BAST was published two years after THE GOLDEN SCORPION. In my review I noted that in 1918 Rohmer loosely tied the villain of that story to Fu Manchu, last seen the previous year, as well as implying that the antagonist of 1915's YELLOW CLAW was also allied to the Si-Fan. But for whatever reason, Rohmer seems to have dropped the Fu Manchu concept for the next nine years. In my GOLDEN SCORPION review I noted that the author sought to distance himself from "Yellow Peril" associations despite his using a Chinese villain. In BAST, Rohmer admits that both "white" and "non-white" societies have usually been unjust to biracials, and clearly Greefe's rejection by both cultures is the foundation of his obsession. Though I'm sure many modern readers would find these observations insufficiently political, I find them relatively enlightened for 1920.

I really wanted BAST to be a myth-novel. But at best, it falls into my category of "near myths," which don't quite manage to take full advantage of their imaginative content. 

THE READING RHEUM: THE FIRES OF FU MANCHU (1987)

Before his passing, Cay Van Ash published this sequel to his Fu Manchu pastiche TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET. Van Ash began work on a second sequel but whatever rough draft he may have completed was lost after his death.

In my review of BAKER, I mentioned how Van Ash had interpolated that narrative into a time-frame of a few months between chapters in the Rohmer book HAND OF FU MANCHU. Van Ash's prologue-- in which he claims to be recapitulating the notes of Doctor Petrie for the adventure that follows-- insinuates that the remaining chapters of HAND, which conclude with Fu's apparent death at sea, also took place in 1914, rather than at the book's publication date of 1917. But 1917, when World War One has been grinding on for three years, is the timeline for FIRES OF FU MANCHU. In fact, Nayland Smith, who's usually a police commissioner with broad powers to pursue Fu Manchu, is inducted into the British army, and then sent to Cairo when there's news of new Devil-Doctor activity. By a fortunate coincidence, Smith's sidekick Doctor Petrie moved his practice to Cairo with his wife Karameneh, whom he liberated from Fu Manchu in HAND. However, before the novel even starts, Smith wires Petrie to send his wife away from their home, on the chance that the Doctor may reach out to harm his former slave. (Arguably, the real reason Karameneh is gone from the whole book is so that Petrie will get the chance to interact with three different beauties while the wife's away.)

The story commences by introducing Fu's new weapon, the super-scientific "fires" of the title, though arguably that device fades in importance of other concerns. Fu comes to Cairo looking for a renegade German scientist who has his own super-weapon-- and it doesn't take a lot of figuring to anticipate that this one is based in real science. However, Fu doesn't have a wealth of resources after all the defeats he suffered in 1914. He has some Arab allies and what appears to be some sort of animal-human hybrid, sort of a "rhino-man," which I guess anticipates the artificial humanoid seen in 1948's SHADOW OF FU MANCHU. In addition, Fu is also served by both of the femmes fatales from HAND, the cruel temptress Zarmi and the incomparable Fah Lo Suee.

The third "beauty" I referenced is one Greba Eltham. This minor character appeared in Rohmer's 1916 RETURN OF DR FU MANCHU, and Van Ash clearly cast her as Petrie's nurse-assistant in order to give Petrie more feminine problems, given that Greba's clearly in love with the physician. Greba ultimately finds true love elsewhere, but she gets into a cat-spat with none other than Fah Lo Suee. Rohmer never intimated that his version of Fah had any interest in Petrie, and arguably even her affection for Smith isn't established until late in the series. True, Fah doesn't love Petrie. She tries to seduce him early in the novel for the purpose of getting information, but after doing so, seems to consider that she's "staked out a claim" on him. Oddly, though, it's the hellcat Zarmi-- who like Greba only appeared in one Rohmer novel-- who *may* get further than first base with married man Petrie, according to a speculative footnote by Van Ash. Fah Lo Suee gets more scenes than the other two females, though I felt Van Ash's interpretation of her lacked some je ne sais qua.

As for the Devil-Doctor, he gets two speaking-scenes near the novel's beginning and at the end. While FIRES is just a good formula thriller with no deeper resonance, Van Ash is almost the only author who managed to duplicate the way Rohmer had the character speak, with a combination of dispassionate cruelty, sagacity, and an odd capacity for mercy. Only one film came close to the fascinating Fu-speech pattern, the serial DRUMS OF FU MANCHU, and none of the comic book iterations were any good on that score. Fu naturally appears to "die" again at novel's end. Rohmer never gave a diegetic reason as to why the Doctor went out of circulation between the years 1917 (not counting a flashback cameo appearance in 1918's GOLDEN SCORPION) and 1928 (which is the year in which Van Ash's prologue claims the Doctor returned). FIRES was not that novel, but perhaps there's some chance it may still be written by someone, someday.

THE READING RHEUM: TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET (1984)

 

Over a decade after Cay Van Ash, former secretary to Sax Rohmer, completed the only book-length Rohmer biography, he published this work, a major crossover of the iconic figures of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu. 

The title, TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET, clearly spotlights the superior fame of the Great Detective, who had remained immensely popular through numerous film, TV and prose pastiches, while the Devil-Doctor had his notoriety stoked only by a handful of films and a Marvel comic book. But there was a substantial connection between the two characters, even though Holmes had debuted roughly 25 years before Fu. When Rohmer began the Fu Manchu series around 1912, the first stories emulated the pattern of almost all of Doyle's Holmes stories, in that the stories were "told" to the reader by the assistant of a heroic crusader, a sidekick who purports to be narrating real exploits. Thus, where Holmes had Doctor Watson, Nayland Smith (main opponent of Fu Manchu) had Doctor Petrie. Given Sherlock's immense popularity in the Victorian era and beyond, there's little to no chance that Rohmer wasn't sedulously imitating Doyle's narrative formula, though after the first few novels other characters take Petrie's place, simply telling the story of their involvement in a given adventure, with no pretense of "recording adventures."

Speaking of the recorder-pretense, Author Van Ash claims that both this book and its only sequel (to be reviewed separately) were compiled by him from notes left behind by the fictional Doctor Petrie in the years before the character's role as amaneunses was usurped. Van Ash in his "fictional" role even makes the interesting claim that unlike Doctor Watson-- who claimed that the final Holmes adventure occurred in 1914, in the months before World War Two broke out-- Doctor Petrie never dated anything he wrote. This conceit allows Van Ash to imagine a story interpolated between the histories of Doyle and Rohmer's characters. According to Van Ash, BAKER takes place during the months in which the Great Detective is completing "his last bow," that of completing a massive espionage plot against England's enemies. This has a salubrious effect of not contradicting Doyle as to Holmes' final exploit. And even though Rohmer's HAND OF FU MANCHU was published in book form in 1917-- the same year Doyle published "His Last Bow"-- Van Ash fudges the dates in the Rohmer work, claiming that this story also transpires in 1914. Indeed, the whole of BAKER takes place over the course of a few months between Chapter 29 and Chapter 30 of HAND. 

All this fine attention to dating-detail would of course be wasted if the author had not managed to get the best out of having two titanic popular-fiction icons cross paths. Happily I can "record" that Van Ash accomplished this aim. Without going into an extensive contrast of the literary legacies of Doyle and Rohmer, I'll generalize that Doyle's detective stories, even with their use of blood-and-thunder, often emphasize what Faulkner called "the problems of the human heart." By contrast, most of Sax Rohmer's thrillers, though they often appeared in high-prestige "slick" magazines, are more pulpish and extravagant in tone and content. Amazingly, Van Ash manages to blend the two approaches.

So, the plot. In 1914, Nayland Smith disappears, and it's clear to Doctor Petrie that the agents of Fu Manchu committed the deed. Lacking any leads, and not being a detective himself, Petrie just happens to have met John Watson at a medical conference, and so imposes on Watson to write an introduction to Holmes. Petrie meets Holmes, who has officially retired from the profession of consulting detective, but who as noted earlier is still covertly pursuing his espionage aim. However, Si-Fan agents learn of the meeting. One of them, fearing that Holmes will ally himself to Petrie, tries to kill Holmes but murders one of the detective's servants. Thus Holmes comes out of retirement to avenge the man's death, teaming up with Petrie to track down Nayland Smith-- which inevitably leads to the uncovering of Fu Manchu's latest scheme to cripple Western Europe.

I distinguished between "tone" and "content" above. The content of BAKER is indisputably that of Rohmer, as Petrie and Holmes chart a peripatetic course, exposing various Fu-crimes, often following the "rational Gothic" pattern in which supernatural-seeming events are explained by some quick of improbable "science." But Van Ash infuses the novel with the humanitarian (if still melodramatic) tone of Conan Doyle's stories. I haven't read every Rohmer story, but I would be surprised to find one in which any of that author's heroes empathize with societal underdogs, as Holmes and Petrie empathize with the short, nasty lives of Welsh coal-miners. Rohmer just didn't put those sort of humanistic touches into his stories.

Van Ash pays just as much close attention to place as he does to time. Every setting comes alive so well, I would find it hard to believe that Van Ash himself didn't visit the locations described. And he does a good job of playing Holmes off Petrie, in that the two of them have never worked together and are more accustomed to their own respective partners. 

But again, all of the lesser challenges faced by the two heroes would have been for naught, if Van Ash failed to deliver on his "clash of titans." In keeping with the Rohmer books, Fu Manchu rarely appears "on stage," which serves to increase the sense of his omnipotence-- though Van Ash pays more attention than did Rohmer to the limitations of the Devil-Doctor's resources. For that matter, Holmes himself excuses himself from the investigation, but it's only so that he can don a disguise, BASKERVILLES-style, and pull a fast one on both Petrie and their opponents. There's only one face-to-face encouiiter between Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu, but it's a small masterpiece. The two are of course aware of each others' stellar reputations, and Fu Manchu-- who has not yet found his "fountain of youth"-- expresses regret that Holmes is too old to be of service to the Si-Fan, or else he Fu would be happy to turn Holmes into one of his brainwashed slaves.

Van Ash also brings in Petrie's future wife, the Egyptian slave-girl Karameneh, who I believe gets liberated from her servitude to the Doctor in the later chapters of HAND OF FU MANCHU. Amusingly, because all the events of BAKER take place just before Chapter 30 of HAND, there are no references in Van Ash's book to Fah Lo Suee, because Petrie has his first fleeting encounter with the daughter of Fu Manchu-- in Chapter 30 of HAND!

For all the uses of "uncanny science" to explain Fu's various enterprises, Van Ash climaxes with a dynamite example of Devil-Doctor super-science (essentially, one of the many "death rays" that became popular in early 20th century pop fiction). Holmes contributes a crucial effort to foiling Fu and then returns to finish out his last adventure a la Doyle-- while the Manchurian mastermind is just getting started on his long career of venerable villainy.

In closing I'll note that Van Ash also responds to critics who correctly pointed out that Sax Rohmer knew next to nothing about Chinese culture when he created Fu Manchu. In compensation, Van Ash has his heroes interview a prominent Sinologist, who works out some enthralling ideas as to how Fu Manchu came to be, without contradicting any of the intriguing hints Rohmer himself provided.

And so the curtain falls upon this meeting of literary masterworks. I'll probably briefly revive my old blog-project, THE 100 GREATEST CROSSOVERS OF ALL TIME, just long enough to append BAKER to that list. 

CLAW CONSIDERATIONS

 On THE TOM BREVOORT EXPERIENCE, the question was raised as to why Atlas Comics had published four issues of THE YELLOW CLAW in 1956, and whether it was a response to the same-year appearance of a syndicated teleseries, THE ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU. My response follows.

_______

Since Martin Goodman was far more known for jumping on trends than was Stan Lee, I would concur that YELLOW CLAW probably had its genesis from Goodman hearing news about the syndicated series ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU. In fact, since the cover date for YELLOW CLAW #1 was October 1956, that issue probably hit stands at least two months before the first episode of ADVENTURES aired in September ’56. The comic book outlasted the series (not counting reruns), published into early 1957 some time after ADVENTURES broadcast its last new episode back in November.

Now, what might have boosted the Fu Manchu TV show? One short novelette with Fu Manchu had been published in 1952– I don’t recall where– but it didn’t see book publication in Rohmer’s lifetime, only getting collected by Daw in 1973 with three ultra-short uncollected Fu stories in WRATH OF FU MANCHU. For most readers, Fu’s last novel had been in 1947 or 1948, and the next to last full novel would show up one year after the series appeared, in 1957– UNLESS that novel got serialized in periodical form somewhere first. A lot of Fu novels were serialized before book publication, but I’ve no evidence that happened with the 1957 novel. Still, the news of a new novel with the devil-doctor might have sparked the TV show, though, as with the comic, it’s hard to coat-tail on a phenomenon if your imitation comes out FIRST.

Addendum: The Page of Fu Manchu reports that the 1957 novel had no serialization.

There might have been an uptick in Asian villains in pop media of the early fifties thanks to the Korean War, but I’m not aware of any major influential challengers to the legacy of the devil doctor– EXCEPT for Sax Rohmer’s second best known character, Sumuru. She had first appeared in a late forties radio serial, but according to one online review, Rohmer’s five novelizations of the character’s exploits did very well for paperback publisher Gold Medal in the early fifties:

Sax Rohmer’s Nude in Mink (released as Sins of Sumuru in the UK) was published in May 1950. It was Gold Medal’s seventh overall title, and their third fiction novel. Like the Fu Manchu series, it featured a series villain, Sumuru, that was molded to be a female version of her male predecessor. In the first two months, Nude in Mink went through three printings—at 200,000 copies per print run (assuming it followed Gold Medal’s usual publishing pattern), that means 600,000 copies in just 60 days. According to The Page of Fu Manchu, it would go through another printing in October 1950, followed by a fifth printing in October 1951 and then a sixth in July 1953. Not bad for a novel that was salvaged from a BBC radio serial from 1945–1946. It would also spawn several sequels: Sumuru (1951), The Fire Goddess (1952), Return of Sumuru (1954), and Sinister Madonna (1956)

http://www.pulp-serenade.com/2020/08/nude-in-mink-by-sax-rohmer-1950.html

I don’t know exactly how “Asian” Sumuru is since I’ve read only one of the novels, but her success might have sparked Rohmer to execute his last few Fu-stories, and that might have convinced TV producers that there was gold in them thar Asian mastermind hills. And of course in the mid to late fifties, syndicated TV was coming out with a lot of pulpy adaptations– Sheena, Jungle Jim, Flash Gordon– so Fu Manchu fit into that overall spirit of pulp-revival.

THE READING RHEUM: THE EMPEROR OF AMERICA (serialization 1927, book 1929)

 

In  my review of DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU, I quoted Wikipedia's "Sax Rohmer" essay, which alleged that Rohmer's novel THE EMPEROR OF AMERICA-- first serialized in 1927-- was an abortive attempt to write a sequel to 1917's HAND OF FU MANCHU, in which EMPEROR's female villain would be revealed as Fu's daughter Fah Lo Suee. However, based on the information I culled from the Rohmer biography MASTER OF VILLAINY, the Wiki article seems full of unsubstantiated speculation. The biography establishes a clearer line of circumstances. Collier's Magazine, which had serialized the previous Fu Manchu novels in America, approached Rohmer about a Fu sequel sometime in 1925, possibly in response to the appearance of two silent-movie adaptations of the devil-doctor in the preceding years. Sometime between 1925 and 1927, Rohmer completed one segment of DAUGHTER, but for some reason Collier's wouldn't pay him for individual segments, and Rohmer needed cash. So he offered the magazine a different serial, one for which the editors presumably did pay on a serialized basis, and only after that was finished did Rohmer return to DAUGHTER. It seems obvious to me that EMPEROR must have been a stand-alone concept from the first, and that Rohmer probably would have roughly plotted out part or all of DAUGHTER when he first thought he was going to serialize the whole novel in (say) 1926.

I also commented in my review that I'd read EMPEROR once before and that I didn't remember much about it. On occasion I've reread a work that didn't make  much impression on me initially, only to find in the second reading that I'd missed this or that interesting quality in the first read. Not this time, though. 

EMPEROR's problem is an exceeding thin premise, possibly not well worked-out because Rohmer devised it in haste. The novel takes place solely in New York, and posits, not unlike the much later teleseries BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, that a labyrinth of caverns exists beneath the city. A vast organization known as "The Zones" has its central HQ within these caverns, and though the organization has sanctuaries in other cities, none of the others are important to the story. The supreme ruler of the Zones is usually called "Great Head Centre," though in one defiant note to the police, the villain assumes the title "Emperor of America."

Though Rohmer tosses out about five potential protagonists, he spends the most time with a policeman, Drake Roscoe, and his everyman-buddy Dr. Stopford, who gets the novel's obligatory romantic arc. Aside from the occasional amusing line, the protagonists are boring, and the villains are made tedious by the fact, despite their immense tactical organization-- the sub-commanders all oversee different parts of New York-- Rohmer never explains what methods the Emperor means to use in conquering America. Thus EMPEROR is a novel that suggests high stakes but fails to make them seem credible.

Possibly because Fu Manchu was on Rohmer's mind at the time, he teases readers with a "Head Centre" who seems to be a yellow-skinned mummy. However, this is a fake-out, since the mummy is a dummy, a prop for the villain. The Emperor uses one Fu-like method to deal out death, that of a poisonous spider, but I don't remember anyone actually getting killed, partly because Rohmer spends so much bloody time with the intricacies of the evil spy network. 

The only good thing about EMPEROR OF AMERICA is that its existence allowed Rohmer to get this weak premise out of his system so that he didn't use it in any of the Fu Manchu books. He must have had some affection for his hero Drake Roscoe, for later he made this character an opponent in some if not all installments of a book-series devoted to yet another villainess: the Sumuru saga.

ROHMER REFLECTIONS

 

At the end of my review of THE GOLDEN SCORPION, I idly wondered as to whether Sax Rohmer might have meant to do something else with Fu Manchu, given that character's guest-starring appearance in the novel. I said:

Even in those early days, had Rohmer received enough negative response about Fu Manchu to make him disassociate himself from the Yellow Peril? And did any such negativity play a role in Rohmer's decision to table Fu Manchu for the next decade, until Hollywood showed some interest in a revival? Only the foremost Rohmer experts may have a clue...

Though it was a fair question, I was aware that professional writers don't live in a hothouse; projects are initiated or dropped according to whether or not they put food on the table. So I consulted the only book-length biography of Rohmer, the 1972 MASTER OF VILLAINY, written by Rohmer's widow and by his secretary Cay Van Ash. (In all likelihood Mrs. Rohmer just provided the information and Van Ash did the writing,)

I haven't finished re-reading the biography, but I sought out the chapters relevant to my main question: why had Rohmer deserted the character of Fu Manchu for roughly fourteen years, the period between the serialization of HAND OF FU MANCHU in 1917 and that of DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU in 1930?

VILLAINY is a chatty bio, filled with stories of Rohmer and his wife making their way in life and traveling from place to place, with only occasional anecdotes about when Rohmer worked on this or that novel or story. No one could use this bio to chart the development of Rohmer's works generally or of the Fu Manchu character specifically. However, the chapters I read suffice to clear up some of the mysteries of the fourteen-year delay.

Though Van Ash doesn't specifically address the question as to why Rohmer allowed Fu to go dormant in the late 1910s, he does comment that the author had other fish to fry, both joining the army during WWI and later becoming involved in theater (where Fu Manchu was considered for a play-adaptation that somehow didn't come off). Van Ash supplies no anecdotes as to why Rohmer didn't follow up the intimations of a Fu-return in 1918's GOLDEN SCORPION.

The biographer does, however, supply a convoluted clue about the process of the devil-doctor's recrudescence. In 1925, the American magazine Colliers apparently contacted Rohmer about a follow-up to HAND-- meaning that the true lacunae is more like eight years, not fourteen. Van Ash does not speculate as to why the magazine wanted some new Fu, though I would suggest that the editors' interest might have sparked by the two silent serial adaptations of the Chinese villain, respectively coming out in 1923 and 1924. 

Rohmer agreed, but he did so expecting that the magazine would pay him separately for each segment of the novel he delivered. To the writer's consternation, Colliers was determined not to pay until they had the whole novel. Rohmer was short of cash and could not work that far ahead without income, so after delivering his first installment of DAUGHTER, he started a new project and submitted that to Colliers. This was the novel that eventually became THE EMPEROR OF AMERICA, and though Colliers only accepted this work reluctantly, the first installment caught on with readers. Van Ash remarks that later, when Rohmer was more flush and was ready to continue with his work on DAUGHTER, Colliers then became much more bullish on further installments of EMPEROR!

Thus, my earlier speculation, though accurate based on what info I possessed at the time, is incorrect insofar as I hypothesized that Hollywood's first sound-era movie with Fu Manchu, 1929's MYSTERIOUS DR. FU-MANCHU, had encouraged Rohmer to return to his best-known character, not to mention the unnamed "daughter of Fu Manchu" who had just barely put in an appearance in 1917's HAND OF FU MANCHU. Not all the blanks are filled on this matter, but for the time being, "tis enough-- 'twill serve."

THE READING RHEUM: THE GOLDEN SCORPION (1918)

 

In my review of Rohmer's 1931 novel DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU, I quoted a Wikipedia article about the fourteen-year gap between that novel and 1917's HAND OF FU MANCHU. However, this was a slight oversimplification, for two novels appeared after HAND that indirectly invoked the devil-doctor. This may mean that in the late nineteen-teens Rohmer had not yet decided to abandon the Fu-series. One of the two novels, which I may review in future, is 1913's QUEST FOR THE SACRED SLIPPER, though the allusion to the doctor is circumstantial. However, 1918's GOLDEN SCORPION makes much more than an allusion, though Fu's appearance is still in the nature of a "guest-starring role,"  of the type I addressed in this crossover-essay.

GOLDEN SCORPION takes its title from a scorpion-shaped token by which members of a criminal organization recognize one another, though the proximate reason for using the icon is that the group's mastermind is named "The Scorpion." GOLDEN is also the second of four prose novels whose main hero is the French detective Gaston Max, following directly on the heels of 1915's THE YELLOW CLAW. The two novels make an interesting contrast in that in the 1915 work, the villain is named "Mister King" and he's never seen except for his hand, which is the "yellow claw" of the title, for all that a few later comic books used the phrase for the names of super-villains. The Scorpion may be one of the few Rohmer characters who resembles a *costumed* super-villain in that he's always seen in a concealing robe and cowl, and he like Fu Manchu-- implicitly a mentor-- commands an array of super-science weapons. Further, though "Mister King" escapes at the end of CLAW and apparently never resurfaces, Gaston Max hypothesizes that both King and the Scorpion work for a great Oriental organization, albeit in different capacities. Strangely, Rohmer does not drop the name of the Si-Fan, which had just appeared in HAND, but calls the overall organization "the Sublime Order."

GOLDEN opens in a manner familiar to Rohmer readers, with an ordinary British man, medical doctor Keppel Stuart, finding his ordinary life invaded by Oriental intrigue. Significantly, because Stuart is a bachelor at age 32, Rohmer mentions that Stuart got left at the altar, a detail inserted to reassure anyone who might harbor ill suspicions of a thirty-something bachelor. Unbeknownst to the doctor, he was surreptitiously visited by famous disguise-artist/criminologist Gaston Max, who left an item of interest in Stuart's care. This causes the Scorpion's organization to target Stuart by having a comely Eurasian beauty, Miska by name, spy on the doctor by becoming his patient. As is usually the case, Oriental intrigue also breed Oriental romance, as both Miska and Stuart fall for each other. This eventually breeds retaliation in the form of a disintegrator ray that blasts into Stuart's house and almost zaps the doctor's head off. (The ray is linked to a missing scientist, Henrik Eriksen, and both the name and the creation show up much later in 1939's DRUMS OF FU MANCHU, suggesting that Rohmer had thoughts of introducing such super-science early in the series but didn't end up doing so.)

Gaston Max contacts Stuart and the local cops and relates a long story about how he Max first began investigating the Scorpion's misdeeds. causing him to encounter both Miska and her assigned guardian Chunda Lal. Max mentions that even though the Hindu is not that large, he's able to subdue a larger opponent using "jiu-jitsu," which seems to be one of the few times Rohmer ever mentioned any form of Asian martial art. During Max's consultations with the police, he manages to talk about the Si-Fan in a roundabout way, even though he's familiar with the cases investigated by "Inspector Weymouth," whose history with Fu Manchu dated back to the first novel. 

Some time after this conference, Miska contacts Stuart and warns him to keep clear of The Scorpion's menace. By this act, she shows that, like Karameneh before her, her passion liberates her from her slave-like status under an Eastern master. It's during Miska's backstory that she details not only her first encounter with the cowled Scorpion, but also with the Scorpion's superior in the Order. Miska only beholds Fu Manchu-- denoted by both his emerald-green eyes and his avowed status as "the greatest scientist in the world"-- because Fu stops by the Scorpion's HQ to inspect Miska as a new acquisition for the Order's usages. (Ironically, though Fu approves of the Scorpion's choice of Miska, the devil-doctor has no more luck with his female pawns than does the Scorpion; both end up losing said pawns to the charms of sturdy Brit males.)

Stuart of course keeps pursuing the villain, and ends up working with Max and the cops in investigating an opium-house. This is the novel's dullest part, though the section concludes with an interesting scene: Stuart is taken prisoner by a Chinese thug who strangles the doctor unconscious with the thug's long queue of hair (!) Stuart wakes up a captive in the Scorpion's lab, and like his mentor, the villain's lab combines such visceral "Asian" horrors (a pit full of killer ants) and hyper-advanced marvels (a special chair rigged to disintegrate anyone who sits in it with the Eriksen ray). While waiting for the preparation of a serum to fling Stuart into catalepsy, the mastermind informs the physician that he will soon be transported to China, where he will be brainwashed to serve the Order. Stuart asserts that he will see the villain hanged, and the urbane evildoer calls the gallows "cruel and barbaric," contrasting that Western method of execution with such a "poetic" concept as his "Throne of the Gods." This remark is in keeping with the methods of the Si-Fan, which use exotic and clever gimmicks to carry out their crimes.

I won't disclose the exciting climax, though anyone reading this will probably intuit that Miska will end up choosing to betray her master in favor of her new amour. A further connection with the Fu-series is seen when Chunda Lal attempts to kill the Scorpion to save Miska, and the mastermind resorts to a 1918 version of a Jedi mind-trick, mentally dominating the Hindu with the arcane powers gained from the Tibetan arts of "Rache Churan." When Max and the police come to the rescue, the Scorpion ends both his life and all resemblance to Fu Manchu, taking his own life through the agency of the disintegrator-chair. He unlike Fu Manchu never returns. Still, even without my having read the last of the Max novels, I imagine the cowled super-criminal rates as the foremost opponent of the French detective. 

ADDENDUM: I should also mention that at the beginning of the chapter "The Red Circle," the author, speaking through Gaston Max, attempts to distance himself and his characters from what one of the cop-characters calls 'that defunct bogey, "the Yellow Peril.''' Max responds to this jibe:

'No, I speak of no ridiculous "Yellow Peril," my friends. John Chinaman, as I have known him, is the whitest man breathing...'

Despite the incorrect nature of the phraseology for today's audience, the speaker's intent is to place the average "yellow man" on the same level of the average "white man," at least in terms of being a law-abiding citizen, unlike the Asian criminals that Max and his allies are discussing. 

Even in those early days, had Rohmer received enough negative response about Fu Manchu to make him disassociate himself from the Yellow Peril? And did any such negativity play a role in Rohmer's decision to table Fu Manchu for the next decade, until Hollywood showed some interest in a revival? Only the foremost Rohmer experts may have a clue...

THE READING RHEUM: THE YELLOW CLAW (1915)

Though I've read two of the four Sax Rohmer detective novels starring Gaston Max, I'd never got round to the work in which he debuted: 1915's THE YELLOW CLAW, a serialized magazine-novel that was published as a book about four years after the first Fu Manchu stories, also serialized in a magazine, began in 1911. One reviewer asserted that this was the first attempt by Rohmer to start a second "Oriental mystery" franchise, perhaps to be focused on the novel's villain, the mysterious "Mister King." This online essay by William Patrick Maynard notes that Mister King did not manage to capture the reading-public's imagination as did Fu Manchu, for all that the "Yellow Claw" novel got a movie adaptation before any of the Devil-Doctor's stories did. Maynard also discusses the possibility that both villains MAY have been inspired by Rohmer's near-encounter with a real-life criminal figure-- though it's just as possible that this encounter only existed in Rohmer's imagination.

Long-time readers of Marvel Comics might look at the novel's title and think that it concerns an actual villain of that name, possibly one comparable to the Marvel Comics super-criminal. But YELLOW CLAW is merely a symbol of the murderous propensities of Mister King, who is barely seen in the novel-- appearing far less than does Fu Manchu in his series-- and, when King is seen, he's signified only by his yellow-hued hands, poised to kill in some fashion, as seen in this early scene.

Through the leaded panes of the window above the writing-table swept a silvern beam of moonlight. It poured, searchingly, upon the fur-clad figure swaying by the table; cutting through the darkness of the room like some huge scimitar, to end in a pallid pool about the woman's shadow on the center of the Persian carpet.

Coincident with her sobbing cry—NINE! boomed Big Ben; TEN!...

Two hands—with outstretched, crooked, clutching fingers—leapt from the darkness into the light of the moonbeam.

“God! Oh, God!” came a frenzied, rasping shriek—“MR. KING!”

Straight at the bare throat leapt the yellow hands; a gurgling cry rose—fell—and died away.

Gently, noiselessly, the lady of the civet fur sank upon the carpet by the table; as she fell, a dim black figure bent over her. The tearing of paper told of the note being snatched from her frozen grip; but never for a moment did the face or the form of her assailant encroach upon the moonbeam.

Batlike, this second and terrible visitant avoided the light.

This sounds like a ripping beginning to one of Rohmer's fevered pulp-nightmares, but unfortunately, as Maynard also notes, Rohmer's trying a little too hard to stay grounded in reality. Some uninteresting regular-Joe characters get implicated in this murder, an uninteresting Scotland Yard inspector investigates, and, many chapters later, Rohmer finally introduces a new hero, the Dupin-like Surete detective Gaston Max. To be sure, Max is not as beguiling here as he is in the next two novels (which I may review in due time), and I can't help feeling that Rohmer didn't really have his creative heart in  this endeavor. Not only does the villain remain offscreen for most chapters, none of his aides are any more interesting than the good guys, and at base King's just a mundane drug-dealer. Without the slight suggestion of an unearthly power in his hands, CLAW would not register as metaphenomenal in any way.

Though in essence CLAW mutates into a "Gaston Max" book rather than one starring "Mister King," Max barely shows up more than King, though Max does assume some Holmes-like disguises from time to time. There's never a climactic battle between the two antagonists, but Chapter Thirty-Eight does include a struggle between King's clutching hands and Max's pure desperation.

A short, staccato, muffled report split the heavy silence... and a little round hole appeared in the woodwork of the book-shelf before which, an instant earlier, M. Max had been standing—in the woodwork of that shelf, which had been upon a level with his head.

In one giant leap he hurled himself across the room—... as a second bullet pierced the yellow silk of the ottoman.

Close under the trap he crouched, staring up, fearful-eyed....

A yellow hand and arm—a hand and arm of great nervous strength and of the hue of old ivory, directed a pistol through the opening above him. As he leaped, the hand was depressed with a lightning movement, but, lunging suddenly upward, Max seized the barrel of the pistol, and with a powerful wrench, twisted it from the grasp of the yellow hand. It was his own Browning!

At the time—in that moment of intense nervous excitement—he ascribed his sensations to his swift bout with Death—with Death who almost had conquered; but later, even now, as he wrenched the weapon into his grasp, he wondered if physical fear could wholly account for the sickening revulsion which held him back from that rectangular opening in the bookcase. He thought that he recognized in this a kindred horror—as distinct from terror—to that which had come to him with the odor of roses through this very trap, upon the night of his first visit to the catacombs of Ho-Pin.

It was not as the fear which one has of a dangerous wild beast, but as the loathing which is inspired by a thing diseased, leprous, contagious....

A mighty effort of will was called for, but he managed to achieve it. He drew himself upright, breathing very rapidly, and looked through into the room—the room which he had occupied, and from which a moment ago the murderous yellow hand had protruded.

That room was empty... empty as he had left it!

“Mille tonnerres! he has escaped me!” he cried aloud, and the words did not seem of his own choosing.

WHO had escaped? Someone—man or woman; rather some THING, which, yellow handed, had sought to murder him!

Like predecessor Fu Manchu, King gets away after his operation is broken up, and according to Maynard Rohmer only invoked King's name in one later novel. But CLAW proved a very dull read even for a Rohmer fan like myself. I can't imagine that the novel itself, even though it probably appeared in various reprintings, would have resonated strongly with any of the later comics-makers who worked on the 1956  YELLOW CLAW comic book from Atlas (later Marvel) Comics. However, in a separate essay I'll explore some possible reasons why the name might have retained some resonance, less because of the book than because of the racial myth Rohmer was indirectly invoking.

THE READING RHEUM: THE SKULL-FACE STORIES (1929-1934), BLACK CANAAN (1936)

 

It’s interesting to reflect on what factors might have led Robert E. Howard, fairly early in his writing-career, to pastiche the Fu Manchu stories of Sax Rohmer. WEIRD TALES printed the first story in Howard’s series, “Skull-Face” in 1929, but Rohmer had not written a new Fu Manchu story since 1917. Despite the early popularity of the Fu books in the nineteen-teens, Rohmer reputedly wanted to end the series, but later decided to return to his most famous character. Possibly some silent-film adaptations of the Fu stories, appearing in 1923 and 1924, helped revive general interest in the character, and it’s been theorized that the announcement of a pending sound-film adaptation in 1930 may have persuaded the writer to pen DAUGHTER OFFU MANCHU, which appeared in that same year. Robert Ervin Howard may have heard about these revival rumblings in advance of DAUGHTER’s publication, and if so maybe he sought to steal some of the older author’s thunder.

Of course, it’s also possible that Howard had simply enjoyed the earlier Fu-novels, particularly because they addressed contemporary concerns about the relationship of white people toward people of color. Rohmer was not given to theorizing about any proposed hierarchy of various races, but even by 1929, a few years before Howard birthed Conan, such theories were clearly a big part of Howard’s intellectual makeup. In fact, the British Rohmer is more concerned with the theme of Europe vs. Asia than he is with inherited racial nature. Indeed, Fu Manchu stands as a refutation of the notion of racial limitations, since he is a master of all sciences from both the modern and ancient worlds.

The four tales I term “the Skull-Face stories” are something of an anomaly, because Richard A. Lupoff, the editor of the 1978 Berkley paperback collection SKULL-FACE, didn’t just include the two extant stories featuring the titular villain—one of which was an unfinished Howard effort, which Lupoff finished. The editor also included two stories, one unpublished in Howard’s lifetimes, both of which featured a villain named Erlik Khan. This later creation did resemble Skull-Face in terms of modus operandi: that of enslaving his henchmen with opiates so that someday the dark races might rise up to conquer the light-skinned ones. I’m glad that Lupoff bracketed the four stories together, for the sake of Howardian scholarship. Nevertheless, the two villains are not identical, any more than are their respective heroic enemies, even though these heroes both share the first name “Steve.”

The three later stories — “Lord of the Dead,” “Taveral Manor,” and “Names in the Black Book”—are passable timekillers, but I have little to say about them. “Skull-Face,” however, is a more delirious exercise, for all that its villain is not the main character, as is the case with the Fu Manchu stories. The central figure of “Skull-Face” is Steve Costigan, a veteran of World War One. For years he’s suffered from what our age calls PTSD, and he’s ended up finding surcease from sorrow in a Limehouse hashish-den. At the story’s opening, Costigan has run out of money and is on the verge of becoming an utter wastrel.

However, the operator of the hashish-den—initially called the Master, and appearing to be a living skeleton—decides to make Costigan his henchman, asking him, “You who are a swine, would you like to be a man again?” Howard never fully justifies the reason why this villain—whose other enforcers are non-whites, ranging from Chinese to Arab to Black African—chooses to employ this one white man as a pawn, even giving Costigan a serum that gives him temporary super-strength. However, at one point, Costigan saves the Master’s life and Costigan considers them even. The evildoer still seeks to make Costigan his slave. Luckily the hero, being a typical Howardian he-man, breaks free, thanks in part to help from Skull-Face’s only other white servant, a beautiful maiden named Zuleika, and from a redoubtable English cop modeled on Rohmer’s Nayland Smith.

Howard’s story, originally serialized in three parts, rambles quite a bit, just as the early Fu stories did. During the episodic chapters, Skull-Face takes on at least two other names, “Kathulos of Egypt” and “the Scorpion.” (The former name is probably an in-joke on H.P. Lovecraft’s demon-god Cthulhu, while the latter might be a reference to the villain in Rohmer’s 1919 novel THE GOLDEN SCORPION.) Unlike Rohmer, Howard has no interest in “the romance of the Orient.” And whereas Fu Manchu is served by henchmen with no thoughts or personality, all of Skull-Face’s minions are major assholes, so that the reader can look forward to the many scenes in which the mighty white hero beats them all to butter.

I certainly cannot claim that there’s no racist content here, not when Howard claims that Skull-Face’s avowed people, the Egyptians, are a people “more despised than the Jews.” Howard apparently based this absurd assertion on the same sort of racial theories that informed the Conan stories, which often posited the idea that certain races, be they Egyptian or Chinese, were not fully human like Caucasians. Howard goes a step further here, in that he eventually reveals that Kathulos is actually a revenant from ancient Atlantis, revived into a mummy-like state by arcane magic/science. For all of Skull-Face’s resources, though, he’s largely a cardboard fiend, with none of the perspicacity of Rohmer’s devil-doctor.

I don’t imagine that a story like “Skull-Face” promoted racism in anyone who wasn’t already racist. It does reject people of color from the table of privilege, and flatters the status quo, but both the good guys and bad guys are so broadly drawn that few would deem them any more than overheated entertainments. Further, though I’ve established in other essays that the mythopoeic impulse can appear in any authors despite their holding offensive beliefs, “Skull-Face” doesn’t really offer any memorable mythic images. Even Howard’s playing to White Americans’ fears of a Black Uprising—a thing readers would never find in Rohmer—lacks any sort of imaginative conviction. (That said, Howard does have Skull-Face mention that he has no intention of liberating Blacks, since he believes they should be his slaves as they were for the Atlanteans.)

Coming from deeper recesses of the mythopoeic mind is Howard’s 1936 short story “Black Canaan.” Here too we encounter the notion that a non-white people, specifically American Blacks descended from Deep South slaves, are not fully human. However, here Howard grounds his fantasy in the notion that because Black Africans predate Caucasians as a culture, the former’s ancestors conferred on all their descendants an inhumanity stemming from their interactions with monstrous demon-gods.

“Canaan,” which takes its title from a real-life Arkansas city, takes place in the 1870s and is told from the viewpoint of heroic white local Kirby Bruckner. The earlier Union victory over the Confederacy has made no difference in the wilds of this domain. Here, white people call the shots while blacks brood in “the jungle-deeps of the swamplands,” which are patently a displacement for the real jungles of Black Africa. Neither Kirby nor any other white character acknowledges any inequity in the hegemony: Howard wants to portray the enmity of whites and blacks for one another to be an inevitable clash of civilizations, not anything founded in social injustice.

Oddly, the individual who warns Kirby that the blacks may be rising against their masters is an old black woman, who enjoys an “Ides of March” moment at the story’s beginning and then disappears. Kirby, being a doughty hero, braves Goshen, the swampy recesses near Canaan, to investigate the rumor. He learns that there is a “conjure-man” named Saul Stark who is stoking the Black folk to rise up against the whites (Howard purportedly based the character on a real-life personality from the period, albeit not one involved in fomenting race wars.) But Kirby meets an even more insidious threat in a young “quadroon” woman who beguiles him in the forests, summons Black henchmen to attack him, and ultimately masters him with what may be either hypnotism or real magic. The mysterious woman, given no name and addressed just once as “the Bride of Damballah,” is a source of endless allure for Kirby. This white hero is clearly capable of lusting for forbidden fruit, a vice one would never find in a genuine frontier-hero of the the 1800s hero, such as Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bummpo.

Saul Stark and the Bride are two of Howard’s best villains. They make no complaints about white people’s injustice; they’re both willing to bring about chaos for the sake of sheer power. And in “Canaan” Howard also makes a much more substantive reference to Lovecraft than anything one sees in “Skull-Face,” for by some magic Stark can transform his hapless worshipers into fish-like monsters a la the piscine predators of HPL’s Innsmouth.

Howard’s use of Biblical lore also enhances the mythicity of the story. The Biblical Saul, of course, embodies the trope of the illegitimate king, and Stark seeks to carve out his own kingdom in an illegitimate manner, though the latter-day Saul does have the blessings of the only “gods” that have objective reality in the story. It’s of even more interest that while Canaan is the name of the town inhabited by the whites, Goshen was the name of the land where Pharaoh sent the Jewish slaves prior to the Exodus. It’s patently absurd to imagine that Howard was not aware of the extent to which American Blacks identified with the Jews of the Exodus through the common theme of slavery, and that if Goshen was the place to which Stark’s minions were confined, even as the Jews were confined, Canaan was the land of plenty that both Jews and Blacks aspired to conquer. It goes without saying that Howard’s tale upholds the status quo both in the historical era and in Howard’s own environment. Nevertheless, Kirby’s partial attraction to the deep truth of humanity’s savage origins ensures that the whites’ triumph is at best a temporary one.

THE READING RHEUM: YELLOW PERIL (1978)

Given that this year I finished re-reading and reviewing all of Sax Rohmer’s “Fu Manchu” stories, I decided I might as well also address this light-hearted Rohmer-pastiche/satire.

All that I know of author Richard Jaacoma is that he reportedly worked for “Screw” Magazine. Possibly this experience led him to the notion of rewriting the pulpish but sexually restrained Oriental adventures of Rohmer into what the Berkley paperback cover-copy calls “a porno-fairytale-occult-thriller!” There are indeed assorted scenes of pornographic encounters or of sexual rituals allegedly based on the disciplines of Tantrism. Yet it would not be impossible to write out all the sex-scenes and still have a reasonably coherent pulp-adventure, so the pornography seems of secondary interest.

In the late 1930s, central character Sir John Weymouth-Smythe works for the British diplomatic service in Bangkok. However, he’s actually an agent for his government, and unlike the more noble lawmen in the Rohmer novels, Smythe regularly undertakes missions to assassinate anyone who might threaten British interests in the region. Jaacoma, however, is not that interested in the seamy side of early imperialism, though he does have Smythe and other characters justify their actions in terms of service to “the White Race.” Despite his desire to keep the “Yellow Race” in its place, Smythe is in love with Beth-Li, the half-Asian daughter of his Bangkok superior Laight. Yet their love seems not meant to be. The insidious Doctor Chou en Shu, master of a murderous band of dacoits, shows up in the diplomatic offices, conducting a bizarre sexual ritual in which Beth-Li and both of her parents willingly participate. Smythe interrupts the ritual, but Chou en Shu escapes with Beth-Li. Later, for reasons that are never really explained, Smythe is hoaxed into believing that the evil doctor has killed Beth-Li. This does motivate Smythe to follow Chou to the ends of the earth in quest of vengeance—though it does seem that the kidnapping alone would’ve accomplished the same thing.

Smythe is forced by his superiors to make common cause with other agents of a “white power” in order to track down Chou—and they just happen to be extremely perverted and vicious agents of the Third Reich. To his credit, Smythe doesn’t find the Nazis to his liking, even though to the last he remains ignorant—like many real persons in The Day—as to the nature of Germany’s “final solution.” Smythe’s mission is further complicated by learning that what the Germans want from the Chinese doctor is a mystical talisman, the Spear of Destiny. (Jaacoma even provides citations from non-fiction author Trevor Ravenscroft to buttress the story of the talisman.) Significantly, Jaacoma’s book appeared in its first edition three years before Spielberg’s RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK made it to theaters, though the basic idea of opposed groups chasing after super-weapons extends back to serials of the 1930s decade. To his chagrin, the chauvinistic Smythe learns that Chou en Shu is more or less fighting on the side of the angels, attempting to prevent the deadly powers of the Spear from bringing about planetary destruction. (There are also a couple of references to the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, though I tend to think Jaacoma just threw these in as window-dressing.)

Although Sax Rohmer sometimes strained credibility by having his Asian supercriminal utilize comic-booky devices like disintegrator rays, Jaacoma has even less restraint than the creator of Fu Manchu. YELLOW PERIL contains such delirious scenes as the German agents slaughtering a horde of dacoits with the help of a band of killer yetis, and Chou en Shu and Hitler fighting for possession of the Spear in a struggle showing that both are possessed by eldritch entities. But this is not a complaint: the pulps—to which Rohmer’s works are thematically related—were great because of their unbridled extravagance.

Now, given that Jaacoma borrows from Rohmer such character-names as “Sir Denis” and “Weymouth” (a minor support-character in early Fu Manchu books), it would not be hard to view YELLOW PERIL as an invidious satire of the Rohmer books. I cannot be sure that this was not Jaacomas’s intent, for without question he means his readers to sneer when his characters prate about the fate of the “White Race.” Rohmer was not a doctrinaire racist, but he can be fairly accused of having played to the chauvinism of his readers with the trope I’ve called the “brown or yellow killer hiding under every bed.” Jaacoma guides his readers to realize that Smythe’s casual bigotry is only skin-deep, and much of the novel shows how he transcends those attitudes to some extent. In the Fu Manchu books the starring villain shows admiration for the dogged efforts of his opponent Sir Denis Nayland Smith, and here Chou en Shu shows an almost fatherly affection for Smythe despite the agent’s desire to kill him. Some Oedipal issues are suggested by the fact that (a) Chou en Shu has sex with Beth-Li not long after Smythe does, and (b) in the end Smythe feels moved to address Chou as “father”—though purely in a symbolic sense, since Smythe’s real father was a distant man who died long ago. I don’t think Jaacoma gives any of his characters any of the psychological depth one can find in the best pulp-ficiton characters; neither Smythe nor his Oriental opponent are as resonant as Nayland Smith and Fu Mamchu. However, because Jaacoma does critique the sociocultural attitudes of 1930s racial attitudes, and because he attempts to show some of the grey areas in the black-and-white worldview of the pulps, I do give YELLOW PERIL a rating of high mythicity, despite its assorted flaws.

THE READING RHEUM: EMPEROR FU MANCHU (1959)

In my reviews of the Fu Manchu series, I’ve largely avoided references to the life of Sax Rohmer. But it’s well night impossible not to acknowledge that the final act of Rohmer’s most famous character saw publication the same year that the author passed from this mortal coil.

I believe Rohmer must have devoted considerable thought to Fu’s finale. For one thing, even though the author made his fame with a Chinese character, the settings of the stories never went further east than Persia. The author had more experience with the Middle East than the Far East, and thus Rohmer’s readers knew the latter only through Fu’s miscreant servants—Burmese dacoits, Sea-Dyaks from Borneo. So it can’t be coincidence that the final novel showcases Nayland Smith finally taking the fight to the doctor’s home ground.

Moreover, Smith chooses to steal a march on his perennial foe. The policeman receives intelligence that the doctor may have initiated a new project in Szechuan Province, and although Smith obviously has no authority in China, he takes it upon himself to send a spy to gather information. Smith selects an American agent, Tony McKay, who not only grew up in China with his family, but can pass as Chinese. Early in the novel Rohmer quixotically suggests that McKay’s Celtic heritage gives the agent some quasi-Chinese features. The author evidently thought better of this idea, since eighty pages into the novel he finally mentions that McKay’s maternal grandmother was Chinese. McKay also bears a grudge against the Communist regime, given that his family was dispossessed by the current government, but despite his long absence he knows the language and the ways of the people. In earlier novels there are a couple of isolated incidents where Caucasians successfully masquerade as Asians, as when Smith himself dons the disguise of an Egyptian. But no Caucasian masters the skill of trans-racial impostures more ably than does Fu Manchu himself, who often finds ways to pass as, say, a Frenchman or a German. Thus, when Tony McKay infiltrates Szechuan in the guise of fisherman Chi Foh, and even fools the doctor himself in terms of Chi Foh’s Chinese identity, there’s a sense of the tables being turned at last.

The sojourn in China also brings the Fu Manchu saga full circle in a political sense. In the first novel Rohmer very vaguely associates Fu’s organization—not yet called the Si-Fan—with a movement known as “New China.” Rohmer may have been thinking of the period Wikipedia calls the “New Administration” of China’s late Qing Dynasty, during which the rulers attempted to respond to the Boxer Uprisings with an attempt at constitutional government. Interestingly, the dynasty is said to end the very year Rohmer pubished his first Fu-story, in 1912. Chinese Communism does not seem to become viable until 1919, so it seems unlikely that Rohmer was thinking of that movement. The author says little if anything about Communist rule in China until 1948’s SHADOW OF FU MANCHU, so it seems likely that Rohmer began putting anti-Communist sentiments in Fu’s mouth in response to the general anti-Communist feeling in Western culture. In the later novels Fu makes clear that he would like to overthrow Communism, both in his country and elsewhere, and EMPEROR makes it clear that Fu speaks as a Chinese aristocrat, when he says, “Communism, with its vulgarity, its glorification of the worker, I shall sweep from the earth!” Yet in the final novel the master of the Si-Fan operates openly in China, with full cooperation from the local officials. When the novel’s lead female speaks of how the Communists regard Fu Manchu, she states that, “They treat him like the emperors used to be treated.”

Said female is Yueh Hua, a young Chinese girl who attaches herself to McKay, whose Western chivalry won’t allow him to neglect a woman in need, even when he’s trying to perform an intelligence mission for Nayland Smith. Yueh Hua proves herself one of Rohmer’s more courageous and resourceful women, in part because she’s got her own mission. Both young people travel by fishing-boat on Chinese watercourses, insuring that romance will bloom even while both are pursued by Fu’s forces, since the doctor suspects “Chi Foh” of being a Soviet spy. At the same eighty-page mark where McKay admits having had a Chinese grandmother, he finds that Yueh Hua is only half-Chinese herself. She too was raised in China but had a Western name, Jeanie Cameron-Gordon, and her mission all along has been an attempt to find her missing father, who just happens to be a scientist abducted by Fu Manchu.

To be sure, though, the rescue of Doctor Cameron-Gordon is a subplot, and for once Fu’s own plot is more preventive than offensive. The activity Smith detects is Fu gearing up to obliterate a Soviet installation in Szechuan, because the Soviets are messing around with plague-germs. Despite having once planned to unleash plague on the Western countries back in BRIDE OF FU MANCHU, the doctor doesn’t approve of the Soviets doing the same thing. But since he doesn’t want to overtly defy Russia, he concocts a roundabout plan to cultivate a horde of “Cold Men”—dead men brought back to life by Fu’s science—and to “accidentally” unleash them on the installation. Though other novels use the term “zombie” metaphorically, and ISLAND even repeats the commonplace notion that such creatures are merely drugged but still living men, here Rohmer yields to the temptation to have his emperor literally bring the dead back to life.

Yet, though in the novel’s final chapter Fu succeeds in thwarting the Soviet scheme, the Russians end up dealing a possibly mortal blow to the Master of the Si-Fan. It just so happens that, coincident with the investigations of Smith and McKay, a Soviet spy named Skoblov pilfers the Si-Fan’s most valuable resource: a coded register, revealing the identities of all of Fu Manchu’s foremost agents.

I won’t go into the specifics of the way that Smith gets his hands on this resource. Suffice to say that the novel ends with the suggestion that British justice may at last be able to triumph over the international cabal. Fu Manchu makes one final attempt to convince Smith that they ought to fight on the same side against the Communists, but predictably Smith makes him no promises. Rohmer does allow his villain the liberty of one last vanishing act: during the Cold Men’s attack on the installation, they really do get out of control, and Fu apparently disappears in a conflagration. Thus Rohmer crafts an ambivalent ending. Proponents of law-and-order can choose to believe that Smith's dogged efforts are finally rewarded with the Si-Fan's destruction, while those who have "sympathy for the devil" can please themselves that the rebellious spirit of Fu Manchu can never be put to rest.

THE READING RHEUM: THE WRATH OF FU MANCHU (1952, 1957-59)

Prior to Sax Rohmer penning his final Fu Manchu novel, the author also produced three short stories with the devil-doctor.

There’s not a great deal to say about the three very short tales published during the years 1957-59, which stories I would guess Rohmer finished prior to starting the final Fu novel. In the introduction to the 1973 paperback collection of all the fifties stories, “Rohmerologist” Robert E. Briney clarifies that the very short stories were written for magazines that allowed for very little space, and consequently little development.

“The Word of Fu Manchu” introduces another one-shot narrator, Malcolm Forbes, who because of a friendship with Nayland Smith becomes privy to one of the doctor’s many assassinations. Malcolm gets to enjoy a little flirtation with one of Fu’s exotic female agents—a woman named Miss Rostov, who seems to be the doctor’s first Russian henchwoman. But there’s no time for romance here, for Rostov disappears from the story and Fu himself shows up to collect the device he used to execute a wayward Si-Fan agent: a metal disc, similar to many such flunky-killing objects seen in Republic serials,

"The Mind of Fu Manchu” enjoys a female narrator, whom Fu briefly abducts in order to learn more of her scientist boyfriend’s experiments with anti-gravity. The tale offers little to readers, aside from giving them a follow-up to Fu’s experiments with alternate modes of aerial transportation, hearkening back to 1940’s ISLAND OF FU MANCHU.

“The Eyes of Fu Manchu” is easily the best of the shorties. Gregory Allen, also a member of Smith’s very long list of boon friends, happens to be working on methods of extending human life. Since this line of research remains of particular interest to the doctor, he sends another of his exotic ladies, one Mignon, to worm her way into Allen’s confidence. Oddly, though the mission sounds like it should’ve called for an experienced seductress, Fu apparently chooses Mignon for no reason but that she must do anything he says to save her captive father. Predictably, Allen and Mignon fall for one another, making one wonder if the devil-doctor missed his true calling as a yenta. Mignon gets some choice dialogue: having been told by Allen that he considered art as a career rather than science, she remarks, “Science creates horrible things, and art creates beauty.” Perhaps needless to say, Smith prevents Fu from adding Allen to his brain trust. The story may have been inspired by an incident in 1952’s “Wrath of Fu Manchu,” the only story in which Fu seems to be unsure that his elixir vitae can indefinitely preserve his insidious existence.

Though “Wrath” was composed before the three lesser stories, I discuss it last because it deserves the lion’s share of attention. I remarked in my review of RE-ENTER FU MANCHU that I thought perhaps Rohmer had no idea what to do with Fah Lo Suee after her last appearance in 1940’s ISLAND. However, I had completely forgotten that “Wrath” appeared in print prior to the last two novels. I would still maintain that that following her resurrection Fah doesn’t enjoy any standout scenes either in DRUMS or ISLAND, so that her absence in SHADOW isn’t all that much of a come-down. During her minor ISLAND-role as a phony “mamaloa,” Rohmer has Kerrigan claim that she’s still in her brainwashed identity of Koreani. That said, Fu claims that once more his daughter has disobeyed his will by siding with certain unspecified enemies.

“Wrath” eschews any reference to Fah’s brainwashed state; with no explanation, she’s back to being the enchantress of old, including recollecting her antipathy to her tyrannical father. To the extent that Rohmer thought about the matter, he probably reasoned that since certain characters had thrown off Fu’s brainwashing before, it was no stretch to imagine this Oriental “superwoman” doing the same. Another Smith-buddy, a businessman named Thurston (who gets no romantic arc), witnesses a fascinating widow-woman named Mrs. Van Roorden (Fah in disguise) on a luxury cruise. A subsequent murder and a mysterious bequest of the murdered man put Smith on Fah’s trail after the ship disembarks in New York. This allows the policeman to infiltrate a meeting of the Council of Seven (presumably not the same one from the early 20^th century).

Before Smith even fakes the identity of a member in order to sit in on the meeting, he’s somehow aware that Fu’s next plan involves attacking Fort Knox—though not for mere financial gain. Though the doctor no longer has a private island for a permanent base, he still wants the nations of the world to acknowledge the Si-Fan as a world power. Here he resorts to the stick (as he did in DRUMS) rather than the carrot (as in RE-ENTER), for he plans to demonstrate his power by using an atomic weapon to destroy the gold in Fort Knox. This scheme is neutralized by a piece of intelligence Smith learns in the Council-meeting—though this is far from the meeting’s most interesting aspect.

(Though the attack never transpires, it seems likely that Ian Fleming—often said to be a reader of Rohmer—borrowed Rohmer’s idea of a Fort Knox raid for the 1959 James Bond novel GOLDFINGER. Unlike Fu, Goldfinger really does want to loot the fortress of its golden hoard, though oddly, the 1963 movie shifts his motives back to a Soviet-inspired plot to destroy the gold’s value. The more things change--)

Before detailing the momentous encounter between Smith and the daughter of his great enemy, a quick review is needed. Fah and Smith barely interact in most of the early novels, and she never attempts to seduce him, though in “Wrath” Smith mentions some such attempt to Thurston. Then, at the end of TRAIL, when she believes that both she and Smith are doomed to be executed by her father, she confesses, in front of Smith, Fu and various strangers, that she is in love with Smith. Fu fakes slaying his daughter and brings her back in brainwashed form, but Smith never makes the slightest comment about her confession. Happily, Rohmer finally gave his readers a conclusion to this amour fou.

Fah Lo Suee presides over the Council-meeting, and since everyone wears exotic masks, she doesn’t initially see through Smith’s imposture. However, she spots him just as the meeting comes to a close, and, having got rid of the other members—who depart to be arrested by Smith’s colleagues-- she confronts him, asking him not just to give her sanctuary from her cruel father, but to become her lover.

In one or two earlier novels, Rohmer had Smith made some oblique comments on some disenchanting affair of the heart. Rohmer evidently did not forget this barely mentioned aspect of his bulldog policeman:

You are a fascinating woman, Fah Lo Suee, but I locked the door on women and the ways of women one day before you were born…

He admits that this is his presumption, since he doesn’t know when she was born. However, in the 1931 book DAUGHTER she’s said to be about thirty. So even though she’s kept her youthful appearance into her fifties thanks to the elixir vitae, she’s not chronologically much younger than he is. Fah Lo Suee intuits that he’s turned off by the apparent May-December aspect:

To yourself, you are an old man, because there is silver in your hair. To me you are the dream man of my life, because I could never make you love me.

It’s possible that in Rohmer’s mind there was some early encounter between the two that the author never committed to prose, and if so, Fah thus became one of the few Rohmer temptresses not to win her man. To be sure, other interpretations are possible. I’ve mentioned the likelihood that Fah loves Smith precisely because he’s been the foremost enemy of her distant and often indifferent father. Further, MASK OF FU MANCHU implies that Fah Lo Suee has enjoyed many light loves—including an implied chemical seduction of Shan Greville. Thus the reader can’t imagine, as he might with Karameneh and Ardatha, that Fah Lo Suee would come innocent to the bridal bed.

However, though at one point Fah seems close to breaking Smith down with her feminine charms, once more the spectre of Fu Manchu intervenes. Within a “flying saucer” of his own design, Fu has traveled all the way from Cairo to New York, and since he’s heard her willingness to betray the Si-Fan, he condemns his daughter to death. However, Smith’s police allies start breaking into the meeting-place. Fu triggers a device that will flood the building. Then he escapes with his aides, trusting that the water will destroy both his daughter and her beloved. However, one of Fu’s aides, who came along in the saucer, shows up to save both of them. Earlier in the story Fah has mentioned that Fu’s subordinate Huan Tsung was something of a second father to her, bringing her treats and giving her the “sweet perfume” nickname—and here Huan has gone behind his master’s back purely as an act of indirect service to his president:

Time heals all things—even the wrath of Doctor Fu Manchu. And a day must come when Excellency will rejoice to learn that his beloved daughter did not die the death of a drowned rat.

And that’s how Rohmer rang down the curtain on the daughter of Fu Manchu. She and Huan Tsung escape the law, and Smith returns to the workaday world, still giving no evidence of having been in any way personally affected by Fah Lo Suee’s exhortations. Given that in 1952 she went into hiding from her father, there was no way that she could have appeared in either of the last two novels, and it would have been pointless for the author to show the doctor mourning the supposed death of his only offspring. Even though Rohmer did not pass until 1959, it may be that during the 1950s he decided that he ought to wrap up all the loose ends of the devil-doctor’s saga while he still could. “Wrath” does so admirably with respect to Fah, ranking with the character’s best arcs in the thirties and forties.

On a small sidenote, only twice did a character named Fah Lo Suee appear in sound cinema, and in neither MASK OF FU MANCHU nor DRUMS OF FU MANCHU is there much resemblance to Rohmer’s character. The five films produced by Harry Alan Towers simply substitute a wholly Asian beauty, Lin Tang (Tsai Chin), but she too lacks Fah Lo Suee’s rebelliousness and romantic yearning. To the best of my current knowledge, the character has been best served in the Marvel comic series MASTER OF KUNG FU. Not all of Fah’s appearances therein have been perfect, though on the whole it’s arguable that she often comes off better characterized in that adaptation than Fu himself. A small triumph, perhaps-- but a triumph nonetheless.