Dr Hermes Reviews - FU MANCHU
CAY VAN ASH

TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET

(Feb 20, 2002)

From 1984, this is almost unbearably good. Cay Van Ash (who also wrote THE FIRES OF FU MANCHU in 1988) not only managed to nail the personalities and trivia about Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu down exactly, he was a fine writer in his own respect. Fans of the lightning-fast, slim little pulp adventures should be prepared. This is an actual book, 436 solid pages, more in the literary tradition of John Buchan. A Doc Savage or G-8 novel can be enjoyably read in a single sitting, but this needs a more leisurely approach. It's not slow-paced but it does develop settings and incidents more fully than the brisk, somewhat choppy pulp style.

TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET is set in a very specific period, April 1914 when Sherlock Holmes (although allegedly retired) was working as a counterspy for the British government, as explained in "His Last Bow", At the same time, there was an odd break in the narrative of THE HAND OF FU MANCHU and it's here that Van Ash places his story.

Wisely, Van Ash does not have Nayland Smith appear for most of the book and Dr Watson only has a brief moment where he provides Dr Petrie with a letter of introduction to Holmes. Including all four characters would have made the book unweildy and much longer. As it is, we get a fresh view of the older Holmes from a non-Watson perspective and Petrie provides us with his knowledge of Fu Manchu. (A story by Dr Watson about teaming up with Nayland Smith would not have been nearly as interesting.) Holmes and Smith are much more different than they first appear to new readers, and it's poignant when Holmes hand over the pursuit of Fu Manchu to this new generation of adventurers.

 Also, although Van Ash doesn't hesitate to add to the canon (Holmes grumpily explains that Watson was shot in the leg AND the shoulder but never made it clear in the Strand stories), he doesn't go overboard and throw in implausible extrapolations as lesser pastiche writers do. We don't read that Smith is Holmes' nephew or that Fu Manchu is an ancient revenant from Atlantis or even that Holmes had children by Mrs Hudson. None of that. Van Ash respected Conan Doyle and Sax Rohmer enough to continue in their tone and themes, expanding but not contradicting.

There is a Welsh scholar who decides that the code name "Fu Manchu" means "the warlike Manchu" and is a title of honor "like Alexander the Great". He also speculates on the origin of the Si-Fan as a motley band of brigands in Sinkiang. But this is presented as a theory, not an established fact, as is the idea that Fu Manchu was a member of the Imperial family who backed the losing side in the Boxer Rebellion.

Throughout, this book is a complete delight. From Holmes reconstructing the scene of Nayland Smith's abduction to the murderous assassination attempts by dacoits with bizarre weapons to Dr Petrie's seeming seduction by the unpredictable Zarmi the Eurasian, TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET never hits a wrong note. It even has an example of one of my favorite conventions in mysteries, when the assistant makes an offhand remark that gives the baffled detective exactly the clue he needs. ("That's it! How could I have been so blind?")

  It's worth noting that here the Asian mastermind's deadly gadget is turned against him (in a dramatic scene that would work well on film), and while I had always associated this technique with the pulp hero The Avenger-- who deliberately manuevered his opponents into destroying themselves-- Holmes himself pioneered the tactic in "The Speckled Band"! And in that story, he quoted Scripture ("The schemer falls into the pit he digs for another") which shows villains have been shooting themselves in the foot for a long time indeed.

It's a disgrace that this book is not more easily available for fans of both the Great Detective and the Devil Doctor. I obtained my copy through a local bookstore, where I usually have one or two out-of-print books on order as part of their service and it took so long to find a copy that I had almost forgotten asking for it. There is a certain joy in finally opening a long-sought book but that's going too far.

THE FIRES OF FU MANCHU (Oct 30, 2001) From 1987, this is Cay Van Ash's sequel to his TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET, and a homage (in the literal sense) to his friend Sax Rohmer. It's a great deal of fun and entertaining in its own way, but it's also very different from Rohmer's work in some fundamental ways. Van Ash's writing style is much more cool-headed and level than the feverish, instinctive prose of Rohmer. Like Robert E Howard and Ian Fleming, Sax Rohmer was delving into his own obssessions, fears and longings when he wrote. You can feel these writers becoming excited as the words spilled out of them, and the typewriter keys smashed faster. Van Ash is fine in his own way-- he places a huge amount of detail about 1917 Egypt into the story without seeming like a textbook-- but (inevitably) he's also more detached. The one element Van Ash neglects is passion. Rohmer was romantic in an old-fashioned but very human way, and nearly all of his books have the narrator deeply infauated and smitten with a woman. Especially when the said lady is treacherous or enigmatic, this underlying romance gives his books much of their spark. Here Petrie has a young nurse flirting with him and Fah Lo Suee seems a tad jealous, but that's not the same as one of Rohmer's heroes being ready to walk through fire for a smile from the woman they love. As far as characterization, Van Ash deftly captures the ongoing trinity of Fu Manchu, Dr Petrie and Nayland Smith with only a slight misstep here and there. (I can't see the bitter, misogynistic Nayland Smith laughingly tell a young woman that she has "a very nice figure.") In fact, he presents Fah Lo Suee as more vivid and more believable than Rohmer himself usually did. She seems genuinely dangerous in her own right, spoiled and vindictive but also heading toward to great destiny. FIRES moves a bit more leisurely than the books in the series, and the plot is looser-- it's more like a 'real' mainstream novel. Since Fu Manchu is without his Si-Fan and Smith without Scotland Yard, the struggle is more personal than usual. The 'fires' of the title refer, first, to a variety of weapons employed by Fu Manchu, which range from Greek fire to a laser-like solar projector to a drifting fireball which is never quite explained. On a deeper level, the fire also refers to the tremendous secret weapon which Fu Manchu And an asortment of spies are trying to capture. Van Ash builds up to a scene that seems inevitable and then shifts gears in a different direction; I was very pleased at being surprised at how he handled this. Although Van Ash is very careful to document when this story takes place (in the long hiatus between HAND and DAUGHTER) and plants a number of references to earlier events in the series, it's refereshing that he doesn't have guest appearances by a parade of characters from other writer's stories. That works in more light-hearted pastiches but it would seriously weaken the impact of this book. A few notes... Fu Manchu has added dervishes to his dacoits, thugs and Western African assassins. He states clearly to Petrie (in contradiction to earlier books) that he has "no ambition to rule your hemisphere, but only to exclude you from ours." On the other hand, Smith also seems more enlightened than before as he says, "It is not China we have to fear; but the Si-Fan-- an organization of outcasts and malcontents, committed to the destruction of all law and order as we know it..." THE FIRES OF FU MANCHU is both a fine tribute to the writer's friend and a worthy addition to the series. We may wish that Cay Van Ash had written more, but perhaps it's best that he did what he set out to do and left it at that. A good storyteller leaves you wanting more.