Customer Reviews

The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu

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This is the second of the 14 Fu Manchu books that Sax Rohmer gave us. Like the first, it is very episodic in nature, revealing its origin as a series of short magazine stories. A reading of the previous book WOULD be helpful for a full enjoyment of this volume, but is not absolutely necessary. Like the first book, this one is jam-packed with fast-moving action and bizarre adventure. It is surprisingly well written; sometimes even elegantly written. Just note the description of the seedy East End in Chapter 11 and you may want to upgrade your assessment of Rohmer as a wordsmith. Anyway, this particular installment of Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie's war against the evil genius Fu Manchu includes kidnappings, wire-jacket torture, poisonous cats, snake murders, albino peacocks, killer apes, quicksand, a haunted house, rat torture, mummy attacks and on and on. It's really remarkable how much stuff Rohmer packs into one short book. You won't be bored, that's for sure!

The plot follows Petrie, a doctor who has dealt with Fu Manchu before. After a mysterious death he is contacted by inspector Nayland Smith, who warns him that Fu Manchu is about. Together they investigate and try to prevent a string of exotic murders The Return of Dr Fu Manchu was written as a serial and it feels that way. The driving force in the story is wierd twisted things that Fu Manchu does to kill people. The characters and plot, which doesn't say much about Fu Manchu's ultimate motives, are just ways of describing this or that exotic death and how it was pulled off. As a serial this would work because the murder happened - cliffhanger. Then in the next installment the murder would be solved. As a novel it didn't work for me because it is so homogenous.

I had heard prior to reading this that Fu Manchu is sooo racist, but I hadn't taken it seriously because so much gets labeled racist by the PC people that I tend to ignore it. Having read this I do think the novel is racist. Fu Manchu's lack of motive is a major point. Basically he goes around killing people with exotic animals, and Smith and Petrie's only explanation for his actions are that he is a, "yellow devil bent on the destruction of the white race" So that was a little blatant for me.

I didn't like this novel because it was built around the gimics that Fu Manchu uses to murder his victims. Character driven is a term I would never ever apply to this book. Fans of Sax Rohmer will want to read this because they know the style and will like it. Fans of the adventure genre should move along.

Fu Manchu is back in what was originally a series of short stories. Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie must stop his plot to destroy the enemies of the Seven. Contains the fiendish torture device called the Gates of Joyful Wisdom, perhaps the villains most grisly device. Nayland Smith is placedin a compartmentalized trap where rats will work their way up his flesh as each successive gate is opened.

There is certainly no lack of adventure or suspense fiction available nowadays - everyone from Tom Clancy to Dan Brown to Lee Child to dozens of others depending on your tastes - but, for better or for worse, these modern novels are a different animal from the classic adventure tales of the early 1900s. Perhaps best exemplified by Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Tarzan series, these stories often bordered on the fantastic but retained a distinctly pulpy sense of storytelling and often a rather Victorian sense of sex and race. Other authors working in this era include the three H's: Haggard (She, King Solomon's Mines), Hilton (Lost Horizon) and Howard (Conan). And right alongside them was Sax Rohmer, with his tales of Fu-Manchu.

These stories focus on four characters in particular: Dr. Petrie, the narrator who acts similarly to Dr. Watson for Sherlock Holmes; the superheroic character in this case is British super-spy Nayland Smith. There is the mysterious and beautiful Egyptian woman, Karamaneh whose allegiance is often ambiguous. Finally, and most importantly, there is Dr. Fu-Manchu, an evil Chinese schemer intent on conquering the British Empire for his own country. Fu-Manchu is an elusive sort of villain, only actually appearing briefly in his stories, but he is the nonetheless the center of the tales. Despite his evils, he is also the most interesting of the characters; next to him, Petrie and Smith appear particularly flat.

The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu is the second chronicle of the battles between Smith and Fu-Manchu. It is not so much a novel as a series of interconnected short stories in which Fu-Manchu's plots are typically foiled. Fu-Manchu's plots involve lethal poisons, vicious animals and murderous minions, and Smith and Petrie often are able to survive through some miraculous intervention, often by Karamaneh (whom Petrie pines for rather chastely).

Compared with authors like Burroughs, Haggard and the others from this era, Rohmer is clearly on a different level; unfortunately, it is a slightly lower one. I understand that this early pulp fiction style of writing was never intended to be great literature, but Rohmer's storytelling is often lacking. That's not to say that this doesn't have its fun moments, but this book also has its dull ones.

The violence is tame by today's standards, any drug use is implied rather than seen and sex is nonexistent, but this is not a book for young readers. Rohmer, sadly, is a product of his time (and he is not alone among these writers); his views on race are antiquated, to be kind. An adult reader should be sophisticated enough to look past Rohmer's descriptions of "the yellow peril" that threatens the white race. Ironically, Fu-Manchu's intellect and his patriotic motives (sinister as he is, he merely acts to serve his country) make him almost the hero of the stories; doubtless, this was not Rohmer's intent. While I cannot give this a whole-hearted recommendation, it can be entertaining and it does give a glimpse at one of the classic villains of fiction.

In the first half of the 20th century, Sax Rohmer was one of the most widely read and highest paid popular fiction writers in the world. In the Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, he shows why.

Professor John Michael does a fine job putting the novel in historical context in his introduction. He describes Fu-Manchu as an embodiment of England's "King Fear" - that violence practiced by the West in the East will come back to haunt the West, and that a global insurgency will arise, intent on violently upsetting the balance of world power. No one in the US cannot presently identify with these terrific fears.

As for the novel itself - no, it is not Literature, but the stories are superbly crafted and always ingenious; you are constantly immersed in an ominous London mist where consciousness is as tenuous as a spider's web, Death lingers at every turn, and the Hydra-like organization you're up against has every intent in destroying Western civilization and you along with it. The stakes are high, and the enemy is always one step ahead... the novel is filled with so much shadow and fog, so many surprises and so much intrigue, and it is so masterfully drawn, so present, that it can be read repeatedly with delight. Or you can proceed to plow through the entire Fu-Manchu series, which I just may have to do. Come, Petrie!

Fu-Manchu is back, and he has added to his collection of marauding monkey-like miscreants, and obtained a baboon killer.

Not to mention a cane that hides an Australian death adder.

Kāramanèh is still running around prominently, and very enigmatically. If she is trying to be sneaky, she definitely needs to lay off the perfume, according to Petrie's nose, anyway.

Hound of the Baskervilles scenarios with writers of Chinese descent, haunted houses and more.

Although Nayland Smith shows a few more signs of cleverness here, he still falls for a trap, and is about to be a rather nasty form of rat dinner.

Cue Egyptian babe, resplendent in harem gear and packing heat.

At the end, they could have even used a big old great dane, as a mummy-man is running around the ship they are travelling on to finish with.