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SUMURU NUDE IN MINK SUMURU THE FIRE GODDESS RETURN OF SUMURU SINISTER MADONNA

NUDE IN MINK (Jan 28, 2004) From 1950, this first book in the Sumuru series is quite a disappointment. The remaining four entries each had something extra to recommend them, but NUDE IN MINK has a rather slack pace and lack of intensity that suggests Sax Rohmer wasn't too thrilled with the character or the story; there's not much of that usual overheated zeal that gave his work such a cockeyed charm. Sumuru made her first appearance in a BBC eight part serial that ran from December 1945 to February 1946. The fact that Rohmer waited a few years before revising the radio story into a novel also hints this was not a tale he was aching to tell but more likely a check he was eager to deposit in his account. Postwar Britain was a bleak time for almost everyone, writers included (this was the era of the kitchen sink drama, for which Ian Fleming's flamboyant 007 was the eventual antidote). NUDE IN MINK shows some signs of its radio origins in the way an occasional chapter will stop dead and the next one start up again some time later with a helpful recap of what has been going on previously. This technique suits Rohmer anyway, giving his books a distinctive pace. The very first scene, though, recycles an incident that Rohmer first used waaay back in 1916 for THE YELLOW CLAW, not a hopeful sign of original thrills to come. The rest of the tale really has the feel and air of an unused Fu Manchu plot dusted off and revised to star a female mastermind. Consider this. A foreign supercriminal has come to England, kidnapping potentially useful victims and killing with grotesque methods those who get in the way. The evil mastermind uses bizarre henchman of different nationalities, has an ambitious world conquering plan, and is opposed by a tense secret service agent whose assistant falls immediately in love with one of the villain's female servitors. (Geez, is this a bit familiar or what?) Rohmer even comes up with a mantra similar to that beloved "brow like Shakespeare and face like Satan speech" he dedicated to his more famous creation. This time, though, it seems clumsy and overdone. ("... Imagine one possessing the arts of Circe and the allurements of Calypso, the brains of Winston Churchill and the soul of a Himmler, you will have formed a rough impression of the Marquise Sumuru.") Our Lady, of course, differs from the Devil Doctor in a number of ways. Rather than putting kidnap victims in a deathlike coma, burying them and then digging them and reviving them as hopeless slaves, Sumuru just uses sex to get the same results. She abducts and brainwashes (or indoctrinates) jaw-droppingly beautiful women and then uses THEM to lure useful men into her power through heavy sexual dazing. It works just as well, and frankly if I had to be held prisoner of either Fu Manchu or Sumuru, it wouldn`t be a difficult choice. Sumuru's goal is to establish a global dictatorship with herself (who else) as queen bee. Her philosophy is to make the world a better place through forced breeding of good-looking intelligent people to produce even better-looking supersmart kids ("By mating beauty with genius, hope to prduce a super race, a race with fine brans in fine bodies.") Gee, doesn't it seem like we heard this not long earlier from one of those dictators Our Lady is so set against? Ask a geneticist how likely this would be to work out. What irritates me about this series is that, first, Sumuru herself doesn't put forth a compelling presentation of her agenda (you'd think if she's such a top level genius, her rhetoric would be more convincing). She has an intriguing goal and a clear (if crackpot) plan for achieving it, but she doesn`t explain it well. Then, too, none of her adversaries seem to be able to come up with anything better than some lame and ineffective retorts. I could think of several replies to the Lady that would at least require an elaboration or defense of her impractical goals, but all these guys can manage is to call her a crook and then bluster half-heartedly. (Her idea that there were no awful wars or atrocities in classical Greek times because they worshipped beauty... well, that needs refuting.) Too bad. There are some interesting points to the Sumuru scheme that are never addressed. NUDE IN MINK has a few other shortcomings, too. Although Our Lady is responsible for the murders (by the rigor Kubus petrification) of two minor characters, her presence is never shown to be a dire threat. Despite the buildup she gets as a frightening figure, her actions don't really support it and her actual appearance onstage is more sedate than sinister. We don't see her presiding over tortures or exploding in rage at a setback; she's too, well, ladylike to seem menacing. Also, and I noticed this in the other entries, for such a world-threatening villain with immense resources and superhuman intelligence, she is foiled and countered by very prosaic investigative means. Sumuru refers to Foreign Office ace Steel Maitland as her archenemy, "the one opponent I fear" but he sure doesn't seem that tenacious or cunning. He's no Nayland Smith, that's for sure. All told, not many thrills or chills to be found here. The final chase is told with the detached lack of excitement you`d find in a geneology chart, and as for the final fate of Sumuru... well, it's not exactly an inescapable doom. It's more like the necessary word count had been reached and it was time for a drink. Still, Rohmer did much better work with the following books in the series, so if you liked them, NUDE IN MINK would be worth reading just to get the full saga.

SUMURU (Sep 30, 2003) From 1951, this was the second in a series of five books* Sax Rohmer wrote about his other mysterious supercriminal. If you have read all the Fu Manchu books and are craving more, Sumuru is very close in style and theme but also has some unique qualities all her own. This particular book has a real startle toward the end, when you realize Sumuru is even more seductive than she seems. (This ending was changed for the British edition SLAVES OF SUMURU.) Rohmer repeats himself most obviously with his pair of investigative heroes, pretty much paler copies of Sir Denis Nayland Smith and Dr Petrie. American intelligence ace Drake Roscoe ("Ka-Chow!") is deeply tanned, steely-eyed, with the tense hyperactive nervousness of Smith... drumming his fingers, pacing quickly back and forth, losing patience with his partner's susceptibility to female charm. Working with him is former BBC reporter Tony McKeigh, now temporarily assigned to Intelligence. Tony is perhaps not so much like Petrie as he is like the young romantic fools that Rohmer so often saddled the misogynistic Nayland Smith with. He goes thrugh an awful lot of emotional agony to win the heart of one of Sumuru's followers. These guys are hot on the trail of one of the great criminal masterminds in thriller fiction, known to her followers as "Our Lady" or "My Lady". She is called the Marquise Sumuru for convenience, having been married to a Japanese nobleman at the start of the war. Like one of Will Eisner's venomous female crooks, she has been married to several very wealthy men, none of whom seemed to have survived for too long. Although she is described as the most beautiful woman in the world, with a spellbinding golden voice, suprisingly few details are given of her actual appearance. Knowing Sax Rohmer, I expected the old boy to make her an exotic Eurasian or half Egyptian or another of his obsessions (not that there's anything wrong with all that, to be sure). One character seriously says that he thinks Sumuru appears different to each onlooker, always what they consider most desirable... the literal "glamour" of sorcery. There are quite a few hints here that she does indeed know a little witchraft and telpathy. There are also a few suggestions that she in fact very old ("Have you sometimes asked yourself why I never change? Have you asked yourself if I might be the Wandering Jewess?") Sumuru is the absolute ruler of a global cult, the Order of Our Lady, which she herself founded. Several times, she mentions how her goal is "to restore beauty to a world grown ugly" and even to forestall the coming war between the superpowers. She mentions how the Second World War could have been avoided if someone like her had judiciously assassinated a few leaders. We quickly learn her real plan is much more ominous and inhumane. Our Lady basically runs a huge religious cult, kidnapping beautiful women from all over the world and keeping them as agents under terror of reprisal and the dominance of her own charisma. Interestingly, most of these followers seem to genuinely believe in their Lady and accept her wisdom without question, like semi-brainwashed members of the religious cults still running around today. Trying to leave means a painful death. These gorgeous minions seduce and entice powerful men into Sumuru's control ("...for men, however brilliantly gifted, readily become enslaved by beauty," as she observes). She's hit on a good tactic here. Fu Manchu used to inject people with a coma-inducing serum and then revive them as his slaves, using hypnotism and fear as additional incentives. Sumuru has harnessed the immense power of sexual attraction to be her weapon. (Let's face it, how many us either male or female haven't acted like fools for a pretty girl or a handsome guy? If I could have back all the time and money I wasted on...errr, back to the story.) Although she doesn't show near the Devil Doctor's mega-genius (with his degrees from half a dozen universities, all his inventions and medical discoveries), Sumuru seems to have instead specialized in the study of exotic poisons. Any purpose, any effect, she has a potion for it. Her most unnerving toxin is the "rigor kubus, a sort of fungus that invades the system and apparently turns the body into something like stone." This leads to some grisly scenes, as her victims freeze where they're standing and turn into something hard as marble. I love this technique, it has echoes of the ancient Gorgon, Medusa, whose stare turned men to stone, and it gives Sumuru a slightly supernatural air. Our Lady's ultimate goal is to establish a new order with herself on the throne, and women of her cult running the world. Men who don't have either useful skills or physical appeal would be liquidated. She has thousands of followers on every continent, and although her actual plan would ultimately end in pointless slaughter and genocide, even now she has become leader of one of the great secret empires. I don't know how seriously we can take her slightly totalitarian vision of the human race reduced to a breeding stock under her enlightened control. Supervillains often had grandiose explanations to justify why they were killing and robbing, none of which stand up to consideration. As you might expect with Rohmer, the heroes are dogged, rather uninteresting bloodhounds on the scent. The villain, on the other hand, is a fascinating mix of traits. She's an incredible tease, for one thing, constantly keeping the surprising number of men on her personal staff worked up over the one woman that they can't possess. Most symbolically, her great joy is swimming nude in a pool and tormenting a ferocious barracuda named Satan. The killer fish batters himself against a glass partition to get at her and she thinks it's the funniest thing possible. This kind of shows how she regards the world. She also has a mink fetish. One of things I like best about Sax Rohmer is that (like Robert E. Howard and Ian Fleming), he is right there in everything he wrote, his fears and joys and preoccupations are right there on the page. Sumuru is an impressive creation, not just because of her strong seductive qualities and ingenious schemes, but because Rohmer himself was feeling her awesome presence when he wrote. Like Fu Manchu, she radiates cunning, confidence and determination that in real life would run right over ordinary people. Now I have another four books to track down.... ______________ *Our gal actually first appeared in an eight-part BBC serial starting in December 1945, SHADOW OF SUMURU. This was later reworked into the first Sumuru book, NUDE IN MINK (hey, if she's wearing a mink coat, she's not really nude, eh?).

THE FIRE GODDESS (Aug 15, 2004) From December 1952, this was the third in Sax Rohmer`s series of five books about Sumuru. This book is so sluggish and disappointing that it hurt my feelings. I felt like a school teacher getting an essay from a student who hadn`t done any research but just babbled on for pages about nothing in particular to fill space. For the first hundred pages or so, I kept going back at the end of each chapter because I thought SOMETHING must have happened, but no... About halfway through, things perk up a bit. There are small flashes here and there of the vivid imagination and fervor that made Sax Rohmer`s early books such an intense reading experience. A few scenes are genuinely creepy, but then things quickly sink down in languid torpor again. International cult leader Sumuru is thinking about stopping attempts to open a bauxite mine near her property in Jamaica. A young American geologist with the dashing name of Lance Harkness is starting to poke around, and at the same time, Inspector Gilligan from Scotland Yard arrives to investigate some suspicious voodoo type shenanigans going on. One of Sumuru`s acolytes, a mamaloi priestess named Melisande has been using voodoo a bit too openly, and her highness disapproves. All this takes forever to be revealed, and not in a suspenseful way, either. It`s just that characters take forever to figure things out and then stall interminably before they reluctantly decide to do anything. Long glowing descriptions of luxurious furnishings don`t exactly give the book any briskness, either. I tell you, if Sir Denis Nayland Smith had been assigned to this case, he would have Sumuru fighting for her freedom in two chapters or less, and she would be damn lucky not to be hauled away in cuffs on the last page. And I would hate to see Sumuru go toe to toe with Fah Lo Suee... the fur would fly! Much of the problem with this series is that Sax Rohmer himself seemed to have conflicting feelings about his female mastermind. For all the talk about her brilliant mind and towering genius, all we ever see is scene after scene of Sumuru lounging about in one revealing outfit after another, postponing any decisive actions until it`s too late. She is the worst tease in history, flaunting her bod to stun men into hopelessly dazed submission. And Sumuru is not above granting sex now and then to get a guy firmly under her control. (Drake Roscoe, the tough American intelligence agent from the previous book, signed up with her organization with the idea he could play along and overthrow her. Instead, he ends up as hopelessly pussywhipped as any high school senior under a girlfriend`s thumb.) Romance has always been an important factor in Rohmer`s plotting. Usually, it`s convincing and a refreshing change from the usually repressed pulp heroes. Rohmer`s characters not only are attracted, they genuinely fall in love like real human beings. In this particular case, though, the love interest falls flat. Good old Lance is smitten with young colleen Derry Kearney but she seems to be so tangled up in a confused halfway state between old fashioned morals and modern hedonism that she keeps him waiting the whole book. The most satisfaction he gets is seeing her walk into a fire and have her robe burned right off, leaving her stark nekkid. This unusual practice is the initiation ceremony of the Jamaican branch of Sumuru`s cult. It seems to be intended to provide, first a chill of alarm that a beautiful young woman is about to die painfully; and then a nice little cheap thrill, as she stands there unharmed in her birthday suit. (Happy birthday, Derry!) What bugs me is that no explanation is given how the Sumurites do this; Derry just says it`s a trick she can`t reveal. The other satisfying thrill is that Our Lady has resumed her use of the infamous 'rigor kubus', a rare fungus which literally turns its victims to stone. This provides a few startling moments and a haunting final image. Along with a brief scene where Sumuru submits a suspected traitor to (rather mild) torture, the strange petrifying death helps link the sinister Madonna to Sax Rohmer`s much better known arch-villain.

RETURN OF SUMURU (Nov 19, 2003)                   From June 1954, this is the fourth of the five books Sax Rohmer wrote about his female mastermind. (In the UK, RETURN OF SUMURU was published as SAND AND SATIN.) In the early 1950s, Yellow Peril stories had fallen into more disrepute than usual and, feeling it was time to give Fu Manchu a holiday, Rohmer presented us with the exotic and imposing figure of Sumuru. .Although she is a fascinating creation in her own right, this particular book doesn`t quite show her (or Sax Rohmer) at their best.           For one thing, Sumuru is not posing an immediate threat to the population. True, she is still pursuing her somewhat abstract master plan of breeding a master race of gorgeous women (and their male consorts) to eventually take over the world. But in RETURN OF SUMURU, there is no feeling that her takeover is imminent. She`s not an obvious menace to you or me, just another weirdo cult leader. As impressive as she is when onstage, we need to feel she is ready right now to overthrow governments and subjugate mankind to justify the way the heroes are pursuing her.         Also (and this gradually happened with Fu Manchu as well), Our Lady is not a thoroughly vile fiend. Yes, she is an international criminal responsible for many deaths and sundry crimes. She can be thoroughly heartless (look at the way she plays her suitors like fish on a line, squeezing everything she can out of them). She even has her own mink farm to insure an abundant supply for her out of control fur fetish (okay, she`s lost the PETA vote right there). And her goal after all is to be absolute tyrant over a global cult devoted to her idea of beauty. But Sumuru is loyal to her followers, rescuing them from harm by other villains. She always keeps her word once given, like the ol` Devil Doctor himself. Most tellingly, she is capable of changing her plans or bending her rules if she thinks one of her followers is genuinely in love with an outsider.             Where Sax Rohmer can be counted on to deliver is in presenting believable characters faced with difficult decisions. No stoic grimfaced avengers here. His heroes suffer a lot of genuine emotional distress and have to wrestle with doubts and misgivings. Romance has always played a big part in his plots; the people in Rohmer`s books tumble for each other with the suddenness and fervor of junior high students passing notes in class, but it`s real human emotion and it gives the events weight. These people have something to lose, they`re not the traditional tough guys walking away with a bittersweet regret.           Returning in this story is a humbled Drake Roscue (somewhere, Dan Turner sneezes). In an earlier book, he had been a federal agent who thought he was strong enough to play along with Sumuru while working his own angle. Nope. She had him sexually dazed but good, and he spent months under her spell before finally getting her permission to leave. He resigned his commission in disgrace and opened a small detective agency in Manhattan. Here he passes time drinking and brooding, until by seeming chance he is again drawn (by a case of a missing girl) into confronting Sumuru again.               We pick up some tantalizing hints about Our Lady herself. While we have seen suggestions that she`s much older than she seems, here there`s a definite reference to her husband, the Marquise Sumuru, committing hara-kiri "during the First World War", which would make her at least in her mid-fifties at this point. Hearing a servant remark that his father before him had been in service to Our Lady, one of the heroes wonders if this is not in fact a title passed down and there had been an earlier Our Lady before Sumuru.               The most intriguing bit we learn comes from Sumuru herself. Talking about how "guided evolution" has produced the best breeds of plants and animals, the ageless supercriminal blithely reveals "Our order seeks to guide the evolution of humanity... to evolve a perfect race. We date back to Pythagoras, and the task was taken up and the system improved by Plato. I myself am such a product, without one blemish in the selection....." Whoa. Sumuru is the result of ages of selective human breeding?! Are there others like her out there (aside from Kimball Kinnison, of course)? And I thought we were told she founded the Order herself?             RETURN OF SUMURU is not quite as lurid or over the top as some of Sax Rohmer`s earflier books, but it still packs in solid amounts of captive nude women being sold as slaves, poison darts and opium fumes, hulking apelike chaffeurs leering down through the skylight, foggy London nights where the cars crawl through the murk, desperate gambits to rescue loved ones from offensive stereotypes and much more. My favorite gruesome image involves Sumuru taking vengeance by shrinking an enemy`s entire corpse down to doll size in the same way Amazon tribes shrank heads. Rohmer even manages to work in many references to his marked foot obsession ("Her small feet, encased in sandals, rested on a footstool, and her toes peeped out between the straps like pink lotus buds." Awwww.....).

SINISTER MADONNA (March 27, 2004) From 1956, this was the last of the five Sumuru books. It gets off to a very strong start, full of atmosphere and ominous forebodings. Who is this delirious patient in an English hospital, babbling about slavery and ruby mines and Our Lady and a puma with gnashing teeth? Why is Scotland Yard interested in this man? What is so important about this ancient jewelled dagger? Why is the doctor being followed by a manlike figure crouching on all fours? Unfortunately, it falls apart rather badly toward the middle, in a confused flurry of too many characters bouncing off each other and engaging in discussions which go nowhere, and it ends the Sumuru saga on an inconclusive note. Much of the reason why this series is not as satisfying as Rohmer`s more famous Fu Manchu books is Sumuru herself. Yes, she is presented as exotic and alluring and mysterious all that, but she is too darn languid. Our Lady is always lounging about in her peekaboo outfits, giving placid orders to her henchmen, posing for statues, nibbling on peaches and laughing smugly. As a criminal mastermind, she gives off no charisma or energy, and she is so full of herself that we never feel her plans are endangered. It might help if she were on the brink of getting away with some tremendous crime that endangers the public. As it is, though, unless you happen to have a girlfriend or sister who has gotten mixed up in her cult, there is not much reason to be worried about Sumuru. It doesn`t help that Sumuru`s agenda is so vague and unrealistic. She is still running her wordwide cult of Our Lady, dedicated to preserving beauty and stamping out ugliness (abstract terms defined by her tastes, I guess). She goes about this by indoctrinating and brainwashing gorgeous women into literally worshipping her; then, she uses these followers to lure men in their power by sexual entrapment. Is Sumuru a pimp, in a sense? I guess, although in addition to huge amounts of wealth, she is also accumulating political and social influence in different countries. As part of her goal to breed a master race of beautiful geniuses, Our Lady seems to have the idea that she can get all the women of the world to voluntarily stop having babies, except the ones that she herself approves. Good luck on that project, Sumuru. ("Better far that ninety per cent of the women living today be sterilized than that they be allowed to flood this earth with millions more hungry mouths.") Since her main agenda is so completely whacko, Sumuru`s current project is the driving force of this story. She is tracking down an ancient talisman called the Seal of Solomon, which has somehow ended up in England. In some vague way, this artifact could allow her to stir up a holy war in the Middle East. Really? How? Fu Manchu with the mask of Genghis Khan back in the 1930s seemed much more of a genuine threat. Rohmer doesn`t present the case for this Seal with any conviction and it remains just another hot potato the characters are chasing after. Each book in this series introduced a new character or two, and by now there are a dozen of them running around. It`s not clear which one is meant to be the main protagonist (if any) or if it`s just a disorganized ensemble group after Sumuru. The young couple of Dr Curly Bowden and journalist Mary Glen are the most interesting and likeable (they have issues with getting married and having to move for his government appointment, not to mention her growing interest in the cult of Our Lady). One of Sax Rohmer`s strongest points as a writer was that he genuinely believed in romance and many of his characters are motivated by natural attraction to each other. It can get a bit mushy but it`s believable; even Sumuru herself makes misjudgements and endangers herself because she can`t resist playing matchmaker. Then there is the Puma. A sound of teeth viciously gnashing outside the window, a glint of luminous green eyes, a victim torn to tatters... Sumuru has an assassin on her staff with some real potential for throwing some excitement into the story. There is even a mention of Dr Moreau, giving a hint of what this Puma guy is all about. He`s the product of a surgical experiment that went horribly wrong. Ah well, he sort of fizzles out as well. Rohmer was great at mood and mystery, but action scenes? Not so much.