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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Reads like fiction,
By Gagewyn (United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer (Textbook Binding)
Master of Villainy was an entertaining biography of Sax Rohmer, the serial author whose most famous creation is the fictional crime lord Fu Manchu. Van Ash began his writing career under the tutilage of Sax Rohmer, who coached him in tweaking his stories and submitting them. This puts Van Ash in a unique perspective to write a biograhy of Rohmer. (Rohmer's widow Elizabeth collaborated on the project, which always helps.)
This background contributes to the biography very nicely. Van Ash, like Rohmer, was a serial author, so the facts presented here are described and paced for maximum entertainment value. Instead of beginning with a description of Sax being born and a sketch of his childhood Van Ash starts by describing a night on which Sax went missing in London's Chinatown and Elizabeth went to look for him. As Van Ash says he uses the character Fu Manchu to introduce the author rather than vice versa. The conventional biographical facts presented here string together anecdotes regarding Sax's life that highlight mysterious events and eccentricities in Sax and his aquaintances. This makes for a very entertaining read. Van Ash's background as Sax's friend also gives the biography certain weaknesses. Often the anecdotes that Van Ash relates are entertaining and pertinent. However trivial and dull anecdotes are mixed in. For example, Van Ash relates the story of how the family cat freaked out and stared at something behind Rohmer one evening while he was writing. Later Rohmer realized that he had been writing about an Egyptian goddess with an affinity for cats. Had the cat seen it???... duh duh duh dunnnnnn. Van Ash has good narrative style but he spends more than a page describing this. Another flaw is that the entire biography is incredibly positive. Descriptions of the twenty year old Sax loosing every steady job he gets are described cheerfully. Affairs he has on his wife are treated positively too. Van Ash is adament that Sax started the affairs without really meaning it, and then kept them going because it would be rude to disappoint the ladies. Scandals are entertaining and an unauthorized biography would definitely be more fun in this area. (Right now the lowest priced used copy at Amazon is about 65$ and 4 of the 5 used copies for sale are former library copies, so in the whole scale of supply and demand maybe someone should reprint this. Just wanted to throw that in. The vinyl covered edition also has a cool picture stamped in the vinyl.) All in all this was a pretty good read. I recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in the subject matter. At the very least you will be entertained.
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