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DRUMS OF FU MANCHU

(Nov 30, 2001)

From 1939, this book is a bit tired in a lot of ways, and the formula is showing strongly – another young assistant to Nayland Smith is hopelessly infatuated with another beautiful Eurasian servant of Fu Manchu – complicating the struggle repeatedly. Smith should have hired gay assistants, to avoid this ("Don't bat those lashes at me, girlie!") but Romance is obviously so important to Rohmer and so rare in pulp thrillers that the repetition can be overlooked. And there are so many other good points that the book is worth seeking out.

As a side note, the 'drums' of the title are a very minor (if frightening) event. One of Fu Mancu's deadly poisons raises the blood pressure so high so fast that the victim hears a pounding in the ears that sounds like actual drums. A very nice touch, but only used once or twice.

Fu Manchu's mission has always been sort of equivocal. His methods are of course reprehensible (murder, torture, brainwashing, slavery, kidnapping) but his goal of overthrowing the European imperialists was understandable and perhaps even commendable. By this point in 1939, with the coming World War so obviously ready to erupt, the Devil Doctor is leading the Si-Fan on a hopeless program of averting that war
by the means they know best... threatening and assassinating the world leaders who are ready to start the conflict. Now whether this would work or not is debatable – nations don't stop in their tracks if their leader dies, and that avalanche of impending violence would take a lot more to prevent than the Si-Fan could produce – but it does produce a curious situation here.

For once, Fu Manchu is working to prevent destruction and bloodshed, and Smith (still committed to opposition) finds himself in the awkward position of protecting dictators like Rudolph Adlon (Hitler) and Monaghani (Mussolini) as well as others not as clearly drawn. Nayland Smith mutters about his misgivings a few times, but he is a soldier with a duty, after all.

Smith shows a lot more craftiness and cunning than his usual 'kick the door down' approach. With his protege Bart Kerrigan, he manages an escape from Fu Manchu's torture chamber that is quite believable and exciting. And he arranges a few ruses at the very end that borrows trick he has learned from his eternal adversary. Usually, Smith is a simple bulldog going after his Chinese target, but he's pretty impressive here and for once he seems like a fit opponenent.

One of the weaker elements here is how Rohmer explains the way both Fu Manchu and Fah Lo Suee survived their seeming deaths in the previous volume. There's nothing impossible about the escapes, but it does add a slightly forced note. Fah Lo Suee is in fact alive and gorgeous as ever, but her memory has been completely wiped clean and she now thinks she is a woman named Koreani. This is one of the most unsettling aspects of the Doctor, that he manages to make his enemies work for him, one way or another. There are hints here that Edison is among the great scientists whose deaths were faked so that they could continue to produce inventions for their new master.

There are a number of creepy touches throughout the book. We learn that the Doctor is capable of hypnotizing a person, not in person but through a television screen (!). One of Fu Manchu's assassins is a semi-human dwarf fifteen inches high (apparently grown artificially, "representing twenty year's culture"), and then there is the dreadful Green Death (Doc Savage faced a similar Green Death a few months earlier), a disintegrator ray and the use of Venice as a setting. But the most haunting image is Fu Manchu calmly sitting and confronting a kidnapped Hitler....

THE ISLAND OF FU MANCHU (Aug 22, 2002) From LIBERTY MAGAZINE, where it ran as a serial from November 1940 to February 1941, this is definitely one of the weaker books in the series. The feverish enthusiasm of the first few books has faded, and Rohmer seems tired of his creations. (Time to turn Fu Manchu loose again, set Smith after him, let's see... we need a young man hopelessly in love with one of The Devil Doctor's servants, oh and a gruesome method of assassination...) Nayland Smith's young protege, Bart Kerrigan is pretty much identical with all his predecessors but (to his credit) he is capable of arguing with Fu Manchu face to face. And, although he doesn't know it at the time, he is probably the only hero who has punched the Devil Doctor in the jaw. We also learn that in his previous journal, THE DRUMS OF FU MANCHU, Kerrigan was persuaded by the authorities to include a false account of the dictator Rudolph Adlon's death. Man, I dislike that revisionism. The death of the pseudo-Hitler in the earlier book could and should have been quietly forgotten. The idea that you could write an account of a nation's leader being killed when he is (after all) in the newspapers the next day doesn't make too much sense. The first third of the book is hopelessly limp and unexciting, as our young narrator tags along with Nayland Smith, crossing paths with Fu Manchu, encountering the mouthwateringly beautiful woman he once loved (but who has had her memory rewritten by the Asian mastermind), and there's chases through dark tunnels and giant albino stranglers and invisible man murders, but it all seems very familiar and half hearted. Rohmer's actual prose is choppier and less descriptive than ever before, with short declarative sentences and very little of the poetry always inherent in his work before. There's also an awful lot of padding and stalling to bring up the word count (this book would have been much more enjoyable edited down drastically or cut into two seperate books). Sometimes this stalling can be used effectively to build up tension or horror before the big revelation (as Lovecraft did) but here it just feels like someone droning on about what they did during last summer's vacation trip. On the other hand, this book does build up to a really tense and over the top ending, as our favorite mastermind is about to threaten the navies of the world with his super advanced submarines (and he could do it, too.) The finale is so reminiscent of the 1967 film YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, right down to the villain's headquarters in a volcanic crater, that it seems likely someone at the screenwriters table had read this book. There are a few nice touches starting about a third of the way through. Sir Lionel Barton, the overbearing archaeologist who has always seemed insufferable to me, is pressed back into the armed forces against his will. Nayland Smith has him promoted to Lt Colonel and placed under Smith's orders. Serves Barton right, the old pain in the neck, although he does come through in a tight spot. Also, Peko the Marmoset is taken hostage and used against Fu Manchu! (Egads, these Englishmen will stop at nothing.) For a heartless mastermind, Fu Manchu is believably upset by this abduction, and frets about how to manuever a supply of the longevity elixir to his nasty little pet ("He mourns him as one mourning a lost child", Ardatha says.) The early stage of the war is an effective background, too. London in the complete blackout is a perfect setting for Fu Manchu's activities and the contrast with the boisterous, brightly lit Manhattan (as the US had not entered the war at this stage) is notable. The absolute horde of international spies swarming around Panama is also useful background for a story like this (although I don't seem to recall any major Axis attempts on the Canal, despite all its ominous appearances in thrillers of the time.) Once or twice, our narrator reflects gloomily on the bloody war going on in the rest of the world, but Nayland Smith assures him that the scheming of the Si-Fan is as great a threat to Western civilization as Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, if not more so. Much of the story takes place in Haiti (the 'island' of the title, although I was expecting some secret personal stronghold of the Doctor), and we find that Fu Manchu has assumed an important role in the voodoo hierarchy. And this is not an historically accurate version of the religion, either... it's the bloodthirsty, human sacrifice based concept of Voodoo popular in the pulps ("African superstition... the forces of ancient and evil gods.") . In fact, Smith and Kerrigan are blessed by a Roman Catholic missionary before they go on their mission. Here is where the book really starts to come to life, and their stealthy infiltration into the Voodoo ceremony has genuine suspense and imaginative descriptive moments. How much of these ceremonies are just Rohmer's vivid imagination I can't say, but they certainly feel menacing and believale. It's worth noting that Fu Manchu has always created his own species of voodooesque Zombies... not literal corpses brought back to life, but his victims who have been drugged into a cataleptic state and buried, then dug up and revived (and the worst thing is that they are conscious during the entire process! Eek!) Doc Savage did much the same thing with his Crime College, wiping out the memories of his enemies and making them into new persons. (The difference is that Fu Manchu kidnaps innocent people to enslave, while Doc is operating on people who usually tried to kill him or others.) Fah Lo Suee makes one of her characteristically dramatic entrances, still trying to wrest control of the Si-Fan away from her father, this time as Queen Mamaloi, high priestess of the huge voodoo cult. Although Kerrigan refers to her as Koreani, the name she used when brainwashed, the fact that she's working on her own against Fu Manchu, indicates that she has regained her memories at this point.

THE SHADOW OF FU MANCHU (Oct 11, 2001)          From June 1948, this is a very disappointing work. When Nayland Smith and his ancient enemy are on stage, sparks of the old magic still flare up, but aside from that, it's just another Cold War espionage thriller and not a very good one. The big dramatic siege at the end falls apart badly into a confused jumble.            Sax Rohmer's writing style has by this time become brittle, dispassionate, and choppy. One of the main characters, Morris Craig, speaks in a 'cute', silly-ass banter that is reminiscent of Simon Templar at his most irritating. The rest use a strange lingo that is a mixture of English and American idioms (Rohmer moved to White Plains, New York, after the books made him wealthy).              Throughout this novel, the phrase "Manhattan danced on" recurs for no apparent reason other than to stress how suspenseful the dire situation is supposed to be. At one point, we are told that Broadway "threw up to the skies an angry glare visible for miles -- as of Rome burning." (Whoa!) I suspect Rohmer was deeply apprehensive about the possibility of atomic war, an anxiety that haunted everyone in the postwar years and it affected his writing. The scientists in the Huston Building are working on a gizmo that will focus cosmic rays into a disintegrator beam and everyone is terrified at the prospects of this device. Nayland Smith says, "Some lunatic like you will blow the world to bits one of these days."              As spies from the Soviet Union, England and the United States lurk and scheme and plot against each other, an outside force moves into the game. Fu Manchu has been reduced almost to the level of a James Bond villain. He no longer dreams of conquering the Western nations under a new Asian empire; he is just trying to snatch this new doomsday weapon before the CIA or KGB can get it. But whenever Fu Manchu or Nayland Smith actually appears, the writing snaps back to life and Rohmer's creative force returns.                While he no longer indulges in his incredibly barbaric tortures (although he still orders an assassination here and there), Fu Manchu still has his charisma intact, using hypnosis and disguise and weird gimmicks. The little hints that Rohmer drops here and there about the fiend are more interesting than the main plot of the book. For one thing, the Devil Doctor keeps with him the mummified head of Queen Taia*, "known to the Egyptians as the witch queen" and he is carrying out unspecified experiments with this head. Also, Fu Manchu still employs unusual henchmen-- in this case, a zombie named M'Goyna, who was a Turkish strangler resurrected by the Doctor. ("I recovered the body before rigor mortis had set in.")              Nayland Smith shows few signs of his age, still being capable of running for blocks to escape pursuers, still tirelessly battling the Chinese mastermind he has been tangling with for almost forty years. A man whom he slugs later remarks, "You are an expert boxer, Sir Denis, and for a man of your years a remarkable one." When the two lifelong adversaries meet once again, Fu Manchu tells Smith, "Because our destinies were woven on the same loom, perhaps I should have known that you would be here..."             A few details are worth noting here. Smith says, "Fu Manchu's organization isn't primarily Chinese, or even Oriental...They have affiliations in every walk of society and in every country..." Quite a change from the days when the SI-Fan plotted to overthrow the white man's governments and establish a new world order. Now they sound more like SPECTRE or the Illuminati than the original Yellow Peril. 1948 was a different world than 1913. Also the organization's headquarters are in Tibet, in a hidden city.                  A member of the Council of Seven describes 'Fu Manchu' as "a strange name, no doubt a nom de guerre." We learned before that the Doctor's true name is quite different and I have a theory that 'Fu Manchu' actually means 'Pro-Manchu' or "Manchu-Restorer' or something like that (sort of like 'Captain America'). More on that as evidence collects.                Although the Doctor is once again compared to the mummified head of Seti (check out the first page of this site to get a look at old Seti), we are also told that his features were "unmistakably Chinese." So make of that what you will.          The most startling moment (and one which shows some of Rohmer's imagination still flaring up at times) is when Fu Manchu reveals a small scale model of the super-modern Mad Science device known as the transmuter-- but the model was constructed forty years earlier by a Buddhist monk in Burma. Nice touch. ____________ *Taia was also the name of an Egyptian princess who was resurrected by magic to became the partner and lover of the supernatural hero Ibis the Invincible, in Fawcett comics of the 1940s. Any connection?

THE WRATH OF FU MANCHU (Dec 24, 2001) From 1952, this very short novel is one of the better Fu Manchu stories. While the feverish intensity of the earliest books has cooled, Rohmer has become more polished and smoother. He packs a huge amount of incidents and details into just over fifty pages. As "The Green Devil Mask". this first appeared in the Toronto newspaper supplement STAR WEEKLY in January and February 1952, and Rohmer always seems to do better with short episodic stories than a continuous narrative. Actually, this is more a Fah Lo Suee story than a Fu Manchu book. She dominates most of the action in this, her final appearance, and she has never been more impressive or alluring as she presides over a meeting of the Council of Seven in New York City. Nayland Smith is also at his best here, acting with resourcefulness and quick thinking, still on the trail of his lifelong enemy. As for the Devil Doctor himself, although he only appears in a few scenes, he certainly gets your attention when he's on stage. One thing that raised a smile was Fu Manchu's use of a supersecret ray to transmute gold into a leadlike substance, threatening to make the gold reserves at Fort Knox worthless. As seen in DOCTOR NO several years later, Ian Fleming had enjoyed some youthful reading of Sax Rohmer, and Goldfinger's scheme has a precursor here. (Strangely enough, the movie version of GOLDFINGER, which deviated from Fleming, veered even closer to this story as it dealt with a scheme to make the gold radioactive and just as useless as this story's scheme.) The name 'Fah Lo Suee', earler said to mean 'Sweet Perfume", here is described as "Lilly Blossom". Perhaps Rohmer had received a few letters from Chinese-speaking readers. We never learn her real name, any more than that of her father. The odd duality of Fu Manchu, with his feudal outlook and advanced science is shown again. In the same story where he is flying a plane at 40,000 feet which is so fast that it has been reported as a flying saucer, the Devil Doctor also threatens his daughter with barbaric torture and brands the sign of the Si-Fan into her shoulder. Fu Manchu is not as fiendish in his goals by this time, trying to force the U.S. government to work with him to drive the Communists out of China and he seriously thinks his own efforts are the only hope for world peace. Fu Manchu also experiences some tense moments as his marmoset Peko seems to be dying, meaning the longevity serum they both use is not longer effective. And there is a wonderfully creepy moment in complete darkness, when Smith sees the Doctor's eyes visibly watching him. Whether developed Chi powers or a scientific explanation, these touches of the superhuman add a lot to the stories. As for Nayland Smith, he is finally beginning to feel the years a bit. There is more gray in his hair with each appearace, his usual jumpy energy takes a while to get going, and while dealing with the Si-Fan he suffers nerves more than before-- "perhaps he wasn't the man he had been", he thinks. And while he's been getting more haggard, Fah Loh Suee is still her usual gorgeous self (Rohmer seldom misses throwing in some nudity, as here she examines herself thoughtfully in the shower to see if she's aging.) As she has since they first met, the daughter of Fu Manchu is still trying to seduce her father's greatest enemy. You know, maybe she was the one who slipped Smith a few shots of the elixir vitae over the years....