The Mystery of Fu Manchu

by Sax Rohmer

  Inspector Weymouth, dazed, dishevelled, clutching his head as a man who had passed through the Valley of the Shadow—but sane—sane!—walked out into the porch!

  He looked towards us—his eyes wild, but not with the fearsome wildness of insanity.

  “Mr. Smith!” he cried—and staggered down the path—“Dr. Petrie! What—”

  There came a deafening explosion. From every visible window of the deserted cottage flames burst forth!

  “Quick!” Smith’s voice rose almost to a scream—“into the house!”

  He raced up the path, past Inspector Weymouth, who stood swaying there like a drunken man. I was close upon his heels. Behind me came the police.

  The door was impassable! Already it vomited a deathly heat, borne upon stifling fumes like those of the mouth of the Pit. We burst a window. The room within was a furnace!

  “My God!” cried someone. “This is supernatural!”

  “Listen!” cried another. “Listen!”

  The crowd which a fire can conjure up, at any hour of day or night, out of the void of nowhere, was gathering already. But upon all descended a pall of silence.

  From the heart of the holocaust a voice proclaimed itself—a voice raised, not in anguish but in triumph! It chanted barbarically—and was still.

  The abnormal flames rose higher—leaping forth from every window.

  “The alarm!” said Smith hoarsely. “Call up the brigade!”

  I come to the close of my chronicle, and feel that I betray a trust—the trust of my reader. For having limned, in the colours at my command, the fiendish Chinese doctor, I am unable to conclude my task as I should desire, unable, with any consciousness of finality, to write Finis to the end of my narrative.

  It seems to me sometimes that my pen is but temporarily idle—that I have but dealt with a single phase of a movement having a hundred phases. One sequel I hope for, and against all the promptings of logic and Western bias. If my hope shall be realized I cannot, at this time, pretend to state.

  The future, ‘mid its many secrets, holds this precious one from me.

  I ask you, then, to absolve me from the charge of ill completing my work; for any curiosity with which this narrative may leave the reader burdened is shared by the writer.

  With intent, I have rushed you from the chambers of Professor Jenner Monde to that closing episode at the deserted cottage; I have made the pace hot in order to impart to these last pages of my account something of the breathless scurry which characterized those happenings.

  My canvas may seem sketchy: it is my impression of the reality. No hard details remain in my mind of the dealings of that night:—Fu-Manchu arrested—Fu-Manchu, manacled, entering the cottage on his mission of healing; Weymouth, miraculously rendered sane, coming forth; the place in flames.

  And then?

  To a shell the cottage burned, with an incredible rapidity which pointed to some hidden agency; to a shell about ashes which held no trace of human bones!

  It has been asked of me: Was there no possibility of Fu-Manchu’s having eluded us in the ensuing confusion? Was there no loophole of escape?

  I reply, that so far as I was able to judge, a rat could scarce have quitted the building undetected. Yet that Fu-Manchu had, in some incomprehensible manner and by some mysterious agency, produced those abnormal flames, I cannot doubt. Did he voluntarily ignite his own funeral pyre?

  As I write there lies before me a soiled and creased sheet of vellum. It bears some lines traced in a cramped, peculiar, and all but illegible hand. This fragment was found by Inspector Weymouth (to this day a man mentally sound) in a pocket of his ragged garments.

  When it was written I leave you to judge. How it came to be where Weymouth found it calls for no explanation.

  To Mr. Commissioner NAYLAND SMITH and DR PETRIE—

  Greeting! I am recalled home by One who may not be denied. In much that I came to d o I have failed. Much that I have done I would undo; some little I have undone. Out of fire I came—the smouldering fire of a thing one day to be a consuming flame; in fire I go. Seek not my ashes. I am the lord of the fires! Farewell.

  FU-MANCHU

  Whom has been with me in my several meetings with the man who penned that message I leave to adjudge if it be the letter of a madman bent upon self-destruction by strange means, or the gibe of a preternaturally clever scientist and the most elusive being ever born of the land of mystery—China.

  For the present, I can aid you no more in the forming of your verdict. A day may come—though I pray it do not—when I shall be able to throw new light upon much that is dark in this matter. That day, so far as I can judge, could only dawn in the event of the Chinaman’s survival; therefore I pray that the veil be never lifted.

  But, as I have said, there is another sequel to this story which I can contemplate with a different countenance. How, then, shall I conclude this very unsatisfactory account?

  Shall I tell you, finally, of my parting with lovely, dark-eyed Kâramanèh, on board the liner which was to bear her to Egypt?

  No, let me, instead, conclude with the words of Nayland Smith:

  “I sail for Burma in a fortnight, Petrie, I have leave to break my journey at the Ditch. How would a run up the Nile fit your programme? Bit early for the season, but you might find something to amuse you!”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sax Rohmer was born Arthur Henry Ward in 1883, in Birmingham, England, adding “Sarsfield” to his name in 1901. He was four years old when Sherlock Holmes appeared in print, five when the Jack the Ripper murders began, and sixteen when H.G. Wells’ Martians invaded. Initially pursuing a career as a civil servant, he turned to writing as a journalist, poet, comedy sketch writer, and songwriter in British music halls. At age twenty he submitted the short story “The Mysterious Mummy” to Pearson’s Magazine and “The Leopard-Couch” to Chamber’s Journal. Both were published under the byline “A. Sarsfield Ward.”

  Ward’s Bohemian associates Cumper, Bailey, and Dodgson gave him the nickname “Digger,” which he used as his byline on several serialized stories. Then, in 1908, the song “Bang Went the Chance of a Lifetime” appeared under the byline “Sax Rohmer.” Becoming immersed in theosophy, alchemy, and mysticism, Ward decided the name was appropriate to his writing, so when “The Zayat Kiss” first appeared in The Story-Teller magazine in October, 1912, it was credited to Sax Rohmer. That was the first story featuring Fu-Manchu, and the first portion of the novel The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

  Novels such as The Yellow Claw, Tales of Secret Egypt, Dope, The Dream Detective, The Green Eyes of Bast, and Tales of Chinatown made Rohmer one of the most successful novelists of the 1920s and 1930s. There are fourteen Fu-Manchu novels, and the character has been featured in radio, television, comic strips, and comic books. He first appeared in film in 1923, and has been portrayed by such actors as Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, John Carradine, Peter Sellers, and Nicholas Cage.

  Rohmer died in 1959, a victim of an outbreak of the type A influenza known as the Asian flu.

  APPRECIATING DR. FU-MANCHU

  BY LESLIE S. KLINGER

  The phrase “yellow peril,” the stereotype of the threatening Asian, did not gain political currency until the epithet was popularized by Kaiser Wilhelm during the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895.1 Yet the dangers of the East had already stirred the public’s imagination. The terrible “Opium Wars” (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) had focused the attention of the British populace on China, as British expeditionary forces were sent from India (including Charles Gordon, later dubbed “Chinese” Gordon for his daring military exploits) to subdue the country and make it safe for English trade.

  A generation later, the Boxer Rebellion in China (1898-1901), opposing foreign imperialism and Christianity, targeted white residents of the country. In Beijing, foreigners were forced into the confines of the Legation Quarter and kept under siege for fifty-five days, until an eight-nation force of 20,000 soldiers entered the country, crushing the I
mperial Army and capturing Beijing.

  In late nineteenth-century America, the Chinese, brought in to build the railways, found themselves displaced as the jobs were completed. They were forced to take low-paying servile employment. Then as the post-Civil War economy declined, anti-Chinese sentiments were fanned by labor leader Denis Kearney and his Workingman’s Party, as well as by California Governor John Bigler, who blamed the Chinese for depressed wage levels.

  The Chinese often refused to be assimilated into the population, clinging to their native religion and retaining their “foreign” language and appearance. As early as 1880, P.W. Dooner wrote a little-known novel titled The Last Days of the Republic, published in California—a hotbed of anti-Asian sentiment—and depicting a United States under Chinese rule. The novel describes how Chinese immigrants, purporting to be harmless laborers, were in fact undercover agents of the Chinese government working to overthrow the U.S. government.

  Violence erupted in many places in the U.S., and in 1882 Congress passed a groundbreaking law excluding the Chinese from further immigration into the country. The law had the effect of forestalling the reunions of many families which had members already living there. Anti-miscegenation laws prevented Chinese men from marrying white women, further preventing the establishment of Chinese “families.” The Chinese Exclusion Act was extended in 1892 and again in 1924, and Chinese were forbidden to apply for U.S. citizenship.

  The Hearst newspapers, fueled by the personal prejudices of William Randolph Hearst, railed against the “yellow peril,” and in 1911 G. G. Rupert, an influential religious figure, published The Yellow Peril; or, Orient vs. Occident.

  The British press was filled with accounts of the ill-treatment of whites by Chinese in China preceding and during the Rebellion. Furthermore, the Chinese residents of London, who were gathered primarily in the dock areas of Rotherhithe and Limehouse, were commonly depicted in press accounts as denizens of slum housing and opium dens. Oscar Wilde’s 1890 Picture of Dorian Gray horrified the public with Gray’s dissolute visits to the dens, and in 1891 the Strand Magazine, home to the Sherlock Holmes stories and other popular tales, carried an influential (albeit likely fictional) first-person account of “A Night in an Opium Den,” reflected in fiction by Conan Doyle’s “Man with the Twisted Lip” in December 1891.

  The evil Oriental genius first appeared in Western literature in 1892. Tom Edison Jr.’s Electric Sea Spider, or, The Wizard of the Submarine World, a “dime novel” published by the Nugget Library, features Kiang Ho, a Mongolian or Chinese—there is some confusion in the tale—who is a Harvard-educated pirate-warlord. Ho, who terrorizes the seas, is defeated by young Edison. He is succeeded in 1896 by Yue-Laou, an evil Chinese sorcerer-ruler featured in The Maker of Moons series by Robert Chambers. Yue-Laou is the first Chinese villain to combine black magic with rulership of a nefarious empire.

  In 1898, M.P. Shiel wrote his most popular book, The Yellow Danger. The story tells of Dr. Yen How, a half-Japanese/half-Chinese villain (“he combined these antagonistic races in one man”) who rises to power in China and fosters war with the West. Yen How is described as a physician educated at Heidelburg and was probably loosely based on the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat Sen (also a physician). Yen How is defeated by the West in the person of Admiral John Hardy, a consumptive who overcomes his frailties to turn back the Yellow Danger.

  Into this world was born one of the greatest evil geniuses of the 20th century.

  * * *

  It isn’t known how much these earlier books affected the work of Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward (February 15, 1883-June 1, 1959), better known as Sax Rohmer. Rohmer—who began as a comedy sketch and song writer for music halls—was fascinated by the East and told a story about a Ouija board that predicted that a “Chinaman” would be the source of his fortune. He worked as a reporter in London’s Chinatown, and the Encyclopedia of Mystery & Detection, by Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler, summarizes his account of that experience:

  [Rohmer’s] research for an article on Limehouse had divulged the existence of a “Mr. King,” an actual figure of immense power in the Chinese district of London. His enormous wealth derived from gambling, drug smuggling, and the organization of many other criminal activities. The apparent head of powerful tongs and their many unsavory members, Mr. King was never charged with a crime, and his very existence was in question. One foggy night, Rohmer saw him—from a distance; his face was the embodiment of Satan. This was Fu Manchu, the Devil Doctor.

  In another version of the story, Rohmer said that his inspiration was a sighting in Limehouse. Waiting in an alley, Rohmer saw a shiny limousine pull up before a rude dwelling. Emerging from the car was “a tall, dignified Chinese, wearing a fur-collared overcoat and a fur cap... He was followed by an Arab girl wrapped in a gray fur cloak. I had a glimpse of her features. She was like something from an Edmund Dulac illustration of The Thousand and One Nights.” (This Appreciating Dr. Fu-Manchu tale is repeated in Cay Van Ash and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer’s Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer.)

  * * *

  Whatever Rohmer’s source material, Rohmer’s short story “The Zayat Kiss” appeared in October 1912 in The Story-Teller, a popular British magazine. It was well-received, and Rohmer wrote nine more stories in the initial series. In 1913, the serialization was collected in book form as The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (published in America as The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu). The character appeared in two more series of stories before the end of the Great War, collected as The Devil Doctor (1916) (The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu in America) and Si-Fan Mysteries (1917) (The Hand of Fu-Manchu in America).

  Rohmer took a break from the evil Doctor and his colleagues then, penning dozens of short stories and novels with similar Eastern influences (Egypt was another favorite setting for his tales). In 1931, however, the Doctor reappeared, with The Daughter of Fu-Manchu. There were nine more novels, continuing until Rohmer’s death in 1959, when Emperor Fu-Manchu was published. Four more stories, which had previously appeared only in magazines, were collected in 1973, as The Wrath of Fu-Manchu.

  In the early stories, Fu-Manchu and his cohorts are the “yellow menace,” whose aim is to establish domination of the yellow races over the white. Later, in the 1930s, Fu-Manchu foments political dissension in America among the working classes. As the wars in Europe and Asia threaten terrible disorder, destruction, and death, Fu-Manchu finds himself working to depose other world leaders and defeat the Communists in Russia and China, hoping to establish himself as the ruler of all nations.

  Although the titular character is the center of attention of all of the Fu-Manchu stories, in fact there are other key characters: Dr. Petrie, who narrates the early tales; his friend Denis Nayland Smith (later knighted for his efforts), a Burmese police commissioner who has made the defeat of Fu-Manchu the lodestar of his life; Kâramanèh, the Eastern slave girl with whom Petrie falls in love and eventually marries; Fah Lo Suee, the daughter of Fu-Manchu, who vies for control of her father’s empire; and later, Fleurette, the daughter of Petrie and Kâramanèh. Sir Lionel Barton, a Sinologist whom Smith and Petrie save repeatedly, also figures in several of the books, as does his daughter Rima and her fiancé anthropologist Shan Greville.

  The mix of characters provides variety that raises the stories above many other works of the time.

  Who was Fu Manchu, and why has his figure had such a powerful impact on Western culture? Rohmer describes him (in The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu and again using identical words in The Devil Doctor):

  Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government—which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a men
tal picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.

  Yet the genius of the man is, at least in the early stories, confined to devising intricate means of killing those who stand in his way. Appreciating Dr. Fu-Manchu Some of Fu-Manchu’s death plots depend on highly specialized knowledge of animals, insects, and poisons; others partake of what might be seen as supernatural means, “black magic,” in the style of the Doctor’s predecessor Yue-Laou. Fu-Manchu’s successful efforts generally take place “offstage” but are reported to the authorities, and it is up to Petrie to discover how the murder was committed.

  Many other episodes involve the discovery of a threat Fu-Manchu poses to one or more of the protagonists and the intervention of Smith, Petrie, or another lesser hero. Smith and Petrie in particular are frequently captured, threatened, tortured, and escape—occasionally by their own wits and frequently with the help of others—and poor Kâramanèh undergoes so many torments that it is a wonder that she desires to remain anywhere near her lover Dr. Petrie.

  Even more telling than the Satanic descriptions of the Doctor’s face are Rohmer’s frequent references to the eyes of Fu-Manchu, which possess some sort of nictitating membrane and strongly suggest that the Doctor is not human. These simple elements reinforce the reader’s fears and make for compelling tales. Not surprisingly, they have also formed the basis of numerous motion pictures, most famously the 1932 MGM film The Mask of Fu Manchu, featuring Boris Karloff as the Doctor. The film’s success, along with the popularity of countless editions of Rohmer’s books, made Fu-Manchu a household name, and Karloff’s portrayal permanently linked the “Fu-Manchu moustache” to a figure of evil.2

  Interestingly, Rohmer was not the only writer to make his fortune based on a “Chinaman.” In 1913, an out-of-work Boston reporter named Earl Derr Biggers began to write fiction. His first book, Seven Keys to Baldpate, solidly established him as a mystery writer of note. However, it was his third novel, in 1923, The House Without a Key, that put him into the top echelon, with the introduction of Sergeant Charlie Chan. Biggers originally intended Chan to be a minor character, but the wise-cracking Chinaman soon came to dominate the stories and appeared in five more novels. Biggers knew well the prevailing stereotype of the “yellow peril” and set out to make Chan its polar opposite.