Sax Rohmer

• Born: February 15, 1883
• Birthplace: Birmingham, Warwickshire, England
• Died: June 1, 1959
• Place of death: London, England

Type of Plot: Thriller

Principal Series: Fu Manchu, 1912-1959; Gaston Max, 1915-1943; Morris Klaw, 1918-1919; Daniel “Red” Kerry, 1919-1925; Paul Harley, 1921-1922; Sumuru, 1950-1956

Contribution

Although only one-quarter of Sax Rohmer’s mystery novels and collected stories feature the insidious Fu Manchu, it is that character who guaranteed Rohmer’s fame and success as a mystery writer. Although he neither invented the genre of the thriller nor created the “Yellow Peril” plot, it was he who combined the two aspects most successfully during the first half of the twentieth century. The stories of Fu Manchu appeared over the course of five decades, which is strong evidence that Rohmer’s creation was popular throughout most of his writing career. Fu Manchu himself underwent a gradual metamorphosis, changing from, in 1912, a self-serving villain to, by the late 1940’s, an anticommunist. The character appeared on radio, in film, and on television. Fu Manchu was also the pattern for many other evil Asian geniuses in popular culture.

Although Rohmer’s major contribution to the writing of mystery fiction is a villain, his detectives do deserve some mention. Fu Manchu’s worthy adversary was usually Sir Denis Nayland Smith or a similar type who had lived in the East and had studied the techniques of Asia. The stories themselves are in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, wherein the brilliant Holmes/Smith matches wits with the equally brilliant Moriarty/Fu Manchu. Similarly, the stories are recorded by an associate, Dr. Petrie, who plays the role of the bumbling Dr. Watson. Over his long writing career Rohmer used many other detectives and villains. None, however, is as memorable as Fu Manchu.

Biography

Sax Rohmer was born Arthur Henry Ward on February 15, 1883, in Birmingham, England. He was the only child of William Ward, an office clerk, and Margaret Furey Ward, an alcoholic homemaker. With his father working long hours and his mother usually in an alcoholic daze, the young Ward was left to develop in his own way. Fortunately, he became a voracious reader, although his reading was chiefly confined to popular novels and to works on the bizarre and foreign. His formal schooling began at the age of nine; he was an unremarkable student, leaving school sometime in the early 1900’s. That he was different from other students is evidenced by his decision, in his late teens, to drop his middle name and to adopt the name of Sarsfield (from an ancestor) in its stead. His interests left him ill prepared for bureaucratic work, and he failed the British civil service examination. He then became a bank clerk.

It was soon obvious that Ward had little interest in the mundane world of finance, and his career in banking was quite brief. He was far more interested in hypnotism, the occult, and archaeology. He turned to writing, becoming a reporter for a weekly newspaper. He also submitted short stories to various popular journals of the day and had his first stories accepted in 1903. Ward soon adopted the pen name Sax (Saxon for blade) Rohmer (for roamer). At first he used it only as his byline; later he used it in his personal life as well. Rohmer met and was married to Rose Elizabeth Knox in 1909; they were to have no children.

As a journalist, Rohmer was assigned to cover the Limehouse area of London, a section notorious for its criminal activities. It was this contact that led to his writing several episodic short stories that he published in 1912 and 1913 in The Story-Teller, a cheap British thriller magazine. These were soon collected and published as The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913). Further serializations resulted in two more novels, and Rohmer’s popularity soared. Rohmer was read on both sides of the Atlantic, as his books were, from the beginning, published both in Great Britain and in the United States. He was soon able to retire from his reporting career and become a full-time writer.

For the next forty-odd years, Rohmer published prolifically, averaging a novel and several short stories per year. He spent most of his writing life in London and New York City, finally moving to New York City after World War II. He also traveled extensively to provide himself with details for his novels and stories. Sadly, Rohmer was never an astute businessman. He was often cheated on contracts, but he rarely chose to enter into litigation. Indeed, on one occasion in the early 1950’s, Rohmer actually signed away the rights to all of his work—past, present, and future. Only after an extensive legal battle, and at enormous cost, was he able to regain his own property. In 1959, he became ill with influenza, which was followed by complications. He was determined to return to England. There he died on June 1, 1959.

Analysis

The London of 1900 was the trading center of the world and the capital of a large empire focused on Asia. East London, an area composed primarily of docks, wharves, sailors’ bars, and working-class slums, was where this international community was centered. It was there that Sax Rohmer’s writing career began. His job was to report on the criminal elements in the Limehouse area of East London. There he had the opportunity to meet the prototypes of the characters who were to populate his novels. He also witnessed, at first hand, the frightening settings for many of his novels. What set Rohmer apart was his ability to blend his reportorial observations with his skill as a thriller writer.

The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu

Although Rohmer’s first published short story appeared in 1903, it was not until 1912 that his archvillain was introduced. “The Zayat Kiss,” published in October, 1912, in The Story-Teller, introduced Dr. Fu Manchu, the evil Asian genius, to the British thriller-reading public. Over the next ten issues a series of adventures pitted Fu Manchu against the forces of good, each adventure ending with the Chinese villain on the verge of victory. Finally, in the tenth episode, the sinister Mandarin was vanquished. In 1913, the serialized adventures were collected into a book, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, and published in both Great Britain and the United States.

Over the next four years two more episodic thrillers were serialized, then published in book form. Rohmer grew weary of the doctor and had the archfiend killed at the end of The Si-Fan Mysteries (1917). Thirteen years later, however, Rohmer resurrected his villain; using the same formula as before, he published seven new Fu Manchu novels in eleven years. It was during this period that Rohmer was most popular. These later novels differed from the earlier ones in several ways; in particular, they dealt less with the Yellow Peril and more with the themes of the 1930’s. Following World War II, Rohmer published three more Fu Manchu novels, the last of which appeared in the year of his death, 1959.

The Asian Menace, Vividly Described

Sax Rohmer’s success may be attributed, at least in part, to his very simple formula for writing. First, his plots were never too complex for the average reader. The English-language reading public of that day feared that Asians, through numbers alone, could someday overwhelm Western civilization. If those hordes ever acquired Western technological superiority, it was thought, they would swarm over the West even sooner. As a journalist in an era of sensational journalism, Rohmer was well aware of the success of Yellow Peril stories. Hordes of Asians, however, would make for complicated stories. Rohmer chose instead to use one man to symbolize the Asian menace.

Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like [William] Shakespeare and a face like Satan . . . 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 . . . Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.

Rohmer endowed this embodiment of Asian evil with a brilliant mind, one capable not only of using Eastern cunning but also of understanding Western science. This was an easily understandable threat. Rohmer was to change this villain’s interests, but the villain was a constant.

A second part of the formula was vivid description. Rohmer’s extensive reading provided him with numerous exotic curiosities for his background detail. His lifelong interest in and study of the Far East gave him an intimate knowledge of Asian exotica. He filled secret rooms with incense, low teakwood tables, and lacquered cabinets. His work as a journalist in London had introduced him to the threatening locales of so many of his works. Fog-shrouded streets, rat-infested wharves, seedy bars, and opium dens provided the backdrop for many of Rohmer’s plots. The characters who populated these environs were also drawn from his study. He once declared, “I made my name on Fu Manchu because I know nothing about the Chinese,” adding “I know something about Chinatown.” Although the first statement may have been true (he filled his stories with racial stereotypes), Rohmer did know how to create colorful characters. In his stories, sailors and thugs jostle one another with a polyglot array of Asian threats. Taken as a whole, Rohmer’s works provided his readers with access to places about which they could only dream. He painted pictures for his readers.

Rohmer’s success also rested on thrilling action. Although his plots are rarely plausible, the action never ceases. Strange drugs, venomous animals, Burmese dacoits, and other dastardly things appear in rapid succession. Death or narrow escape occurs on almost every page. Only through skill, much luck, and many adventures are the schemes of Dr. Fu Manchu foiled. Rohmer himself did not create the thriller genre; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle pioneered it in the late nineteenth century. Rohmer simply added a few twists of his own. Rohmer’s sleuths were less intelligent but more dogged than Holmes. More important, his sleuths underwent far more exciting chases and adventures than did Holmes.

In another way, Rohmer reversed the formula, shifting emphasis to the villain: Although rarely seen in the books, Dr. Fu Manchu is always the focal point. Furthermore, Fu Manchu usually failed because of the ineptitude of his minions, especially his female (usually beautiful) operatives who fell in love with the wrong person. (This is yet another difference; Rohmer used a love element to titillate his audience.) Rohmer’s formula was used with great success by many other authors throughout the first half of the twentieth century. One need only note the success of the Flash Gordon series character Ming the Merciless for a parallel.

President Fu Manchu and Emperor Fu Manchu

Rohmer’s plots reflected his times. He was never so tightly bound by a formula that he could not meet the interests of his readers. When Dr. Fu Manchu was first introduced, he was evil incarnate. The early novels reflected the nationalism, the xenophobia, and the white man’s racism of the immediate pre-World War I era. The novels of the 1930’s were different, dealing with political activities of that turbulent era. President Fu Manchu (1936) portrayed the Chinese menace as the power behind a demagogic American presidential candidate. The Drums of Fu Manchu (1939) had him fighting Fascism and deposing Rudolf Adlon (Adolf Hitler). Also in the 1930’s, Fu Manchu, while still Asian, became more of a supercriminal than the personification of the Yellow Peril. Fascism was more to be feared than the Chinese, who, after all, were fighting the Japanese. After World War II Fu Manchu returned as an anticommunist. In Emperor Fu Manchu (1959) he strived to rid his homeland of the communists who were destroying “his” China. Although these plots date the stories, it can be seen that Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels are a barometer of certain public opinions during the twentieth century. His popularity was a measure of what the public wanted to read.

Other Series

In addition to the highly successful Fu Manchu series, Rohmer utilized many other characters. A series of five Sumuru novels (1950-1956) featured a female villain. Although the Sumuru books were mildly popular, Rohmer dropped her to return to Fu Manchu. Earlier in his career, he had written several books featuring the psychic detective Morris Klaw. In Brood of the Witch Queen (1918), The Quest of the Sacred Slipper (1919), and The Dream-Detective (1920), Klaw solved bizarre cases by using his psychic powers. Another detective used by Rohmer was Gaston Max, who fought supercriminals in The Yellow Claw (1915), The Golden Scorpion (1919), and The Day the World Ended (1930) or Axis agents in Seven Sins (1943). Paul Harley appeared in Bat-Wing (1921) and Fire-Tongue (1922), and Chief Inspector Daniel “Red” Kerry was featured in Dope (1919) and Yellow Shadows (1925).

Rohmer is best remembered for a villain, Fu Manchu. His plots were simple, full of action, and thrilling. He cannot be considered a great or innovative writer, but he was a good teller of tales. His stories reflected his times, and his work was popular because his audience, which was by no means intellectual, identified with what it read.

Principal Series Character:

• Fu Manchu , a brilliant Mandarin Chinese who used his criminal organization, the Si-Fan, in various attempts to conquer the world, was to millions of readers the symbol of the “Yellow Peril” that faced the Western world. Instead of hordes of Asiatic invaders, however, Rohmer utilized exotic locations, devices, and people to create an atmosphere of fear, dread, and doom. Fu Manchu was always defeated, but always just barely.

Bibliography

Chan, Jachinson. Chinese American Masculinities: From Fu Manchu to Bruce Lee. New York: Routledge, 2001. Study of the gendering of iconic Chinese American male characters, including Fu Manchu, in film and fiction.

Chen, Tina. “Dissecting the ’Devil Doctor’: Stereotype and Sensationalism in Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu.” In Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. Discussion of the intersection of the conventions of racial stereotype and sensationalist fiction in the figure of Fu Manchu.

Christensen, Peter. “Political Appeal of Dr. Fu Manchu.” In The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film, edited by Stacy Gillis and Philippa Gates. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Examines the ideologies of race and nation that lie behind the popularity of the Fu Manchu character.

Clegg, Jenny. Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril: The Making of a Racist Myth. Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England: Trentham Books, 1994. Brief but focused study of the nationalist and racist agendas behind Rohmer’s characterization of Fu Manchu.

Frayling, Christopher. “Criminal Tendencies: Sax Rohmer and the Devil Doctor.” London Magazine 13 (June/July, 1973): 65-80. Extended discussion of Rohmer and Fu Manchu, his most famous creation.

Kingsbury, Karen. “Yellow Peril, Dark Hero: Fu Manchu and the ’Gothic Bedevilment’ of Racist Intent.” In The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination, edited by Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Argues that Rohmer’s works represent a version of gothic fiction and that his specific methods of representing racial otherness employ gothic modes of othering.

Van Ash, Cay, and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer. Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer, edited by Robert E. Briney. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972. Extended study of the life and fiction of Sax Rohmer.