Sax Rohmer
By:
February 15, 2012
“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….” Thus did the Anglo-Irish pulp writer SAX ROHMER (Arthur Henry Ward, 1883-1959) introduce Fu Manchu in 1912. His brilliant scientist master criminal was a ripoff of Conan Doyle’s Moriarty (while his intrepid sleuth Nayland Smith, and Smith’s comrade/biographer Dr. Petrie, aped Holmes and Watson), but Rohmer’s yarns found purchase in pop culture by stoking readers’ fear of a Yellow Peril emerging from the East. Opposed to British colonial interference in Asia, Fu Manchu (who is clean-shaven, in the stories; the mustache got its name from Hollywood’s version of the character) wages a war of terror on British soil via fiendish inventions and chemical weapons, not to mention pythons, spiders, and knife-wielding Thuggee assassins. Rohmer also wrote non-sf detective thrillers — concerning the adventures of, e.g., Gaston Max, Morris Klaw, and The Crime Magnet — but it was his racist depiction of the sinister Fu Manchu, ancestor of Ming the Merciless, Dr. No, and the Mandarin, which made him one of the most successful authors of science fiction’s Radium Age. He died in 1959 of the Asian Flu.
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Sax Rohmer died of the Asian Flu?
Once more, irony moves its huge hand…
Joshua:
Not great literature, or even equal to the Sherlock Holmes series, but the Fu Manchu stories, as with the best of pulp fiction, do qualify as splendid guilty pleasures. And Rohmer’s tales are especially interesting when read with their historical context in mind.
The eponymous villain was certainly a racist depiction, but more important to his popularity at the time of publication was the author’s use of psychological (sociological?) projection, wherein an invented Asia arch-criminal attempts to take over the western world by nefarious methods, notably through the use of murder, smuggling, gangsters, drugs and prostitution. These narratives satisfied the hunger of an acquiescent population willing to transfer their guilt for living off the blood, booty, pain, and death of those who were actually harmed, thus blaming the victims and accusing them (in the person of Fu Manchu) of the clearly criminal policies actually practiced by the French, British and American governments and corporations on the Chinese people 70 years earlier. (“What?” you say. Please Google Opium Wars.)
Pretty slick trick, and a perfect propaganda model for 21st Century demagogues and the corporate media: Simply blame your victim.
To quote the great and powerful OZ, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”
Any comments?
I love this analysis of why the Fu Manchu stories were so popular, thanks Denis.