THE READING RHEUM: THE SHADOW OF FU MANCHU (1948)

                                        

My Pyramid copy of ISLAND OF FU MANCHU attests that the copyright date was 1940, though other sources claim the book came out in 1941. Thus, depending on whose facts are correct, either seven or eight years passed before Sax Rohmer wrote a new Fu Manchu novel. Up to that point, this was exceeded only by the gap between HAND OF FU MANCHU in 1917 and DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU in 1931.

It’s been said that in the earlier case, Rohmer came back to Fu because nothing else he did in the intervening years sold all that much better. Additionally, sound cinema initiated a new phase of Fu Manchu adaptations in the late twenties and early thirties, which could not have failed to make the property valuable to the author. However, Fu-adaptations fell out of favor in most media during Rohmer’s most prolific work on the series, excepting only the DRUMS OF FU MANCHU serial and DETECTIVE COMICS’ 1939 reprints of a Fu comic-strip, circa 1931-33.

I’ve heard it said that in the early thirties saw some protests as to the villain’s status as a symbol of anti-Chinese sentiment. The devil-doctor may have become even more problematic during WWII, when real-life Chinese suffered under the yoke of the Japanese, and so became potential allies to the anti-Axis effort. In ISLAND Rohmer labors mightily to keep Fu’s deviltry separated from real-world horrors, with only spotty acknowledgements of a World War in the background. Rohmer clearly wants the readers to think of Fu Manchu as a world-beater, rather than as a relic of another generation’s fears.

By 1948, when SHADOW OF FU MANCHU appeared, the war was long over, though the novel includes some significant touchstones of the great conflict. Indeed, when Fu first appears in the story, he’s assumed an identity like none seen before: that of a consulting physician in Manhattan: “Professor Hoffmeyer, the celebrated Viennese psychiatrist.” Given the doctor’s skill with disguises, it’s not surprising that he might assume a non-Chinese identity with such facility, using Hoffmeyer’s sufferings in Nazi prison camps as an excuse to camoflague his supposedly injured eyes and hands. It is surprising that such a genius would force himself to play head-shrinker to the Manhattan elite for any reason. Still, it’s interesting that Fu’s first post-war role is that of a concentration camp survivor. Rohmer never goes so far to state that the fictional Hoffmeyer is supposed to be Jewish, but for an educated reader of the period, “Viennese psychiatrist” would almost certainly put one in mind of Austria’s most famous Jewish son, Sigmund Freud. (To be sure, the Hollmeyer guise never plays a large role in the story.)

Again Fu appears in somewhat reduced circumstances following the destruction of a super-scientific redoubt. He certainly doesn’t have recourse to any invisibility fields or disintegrator rays as he and his allies skulk around Manhattan. He has no scheme of world-domination this time, but rather seeks to forestall a real-world threat to the world, that of the Communist movement. Though Rohmer avoided saying much about Nazism-- again, possibly because the armed conflict was a little too real next to Fu’s mad plots—the author makes no bones about Communism’s iniquity. As in real life, the precise nature of the Communist threat in SHADOW is fairly obscure, but it seems to come down to the doctor’s wish to keep the Russians from gaining access to a unique atom-bomb defense, being formulated by New York physicist Morris Craig.

Though Craig is the romantic focus of the story—he’s being watched by his sexy secretary Camille Navarre, who is both a British undercover agent and an unwitting tool of the devil-doctor—he’s barely involved in the action scenes. Instead, Nayland Smith takes the foreground, and though the reader is never really “in his head,” his is the main POV throughout SHADOW. There’s no “Doctor Watson” figure herein.

I commented in TRAIL that Fleurette was the first woman to get her own POV chapter, but Camille gets quite a few of them, and certainly she’s a more compelling character than the rather vague (if conventionally young and handsome) physicist. Fu Manchu uses his considerable hypnotic talents—though apparently no drugs—to make Camille serve him in his attempt to spirit away Craig’s plans. If not for Smih’s doggedness, Fu would probably work his will in jig-time—but the protracted plot-action does give Camille a lot more space. She’s one of the few characters who manages to defy Fu’s hypnosis to a small extent, and, as with Moya in PRESIDENT, the doctor makes a mild attempt to convert her to his cause of her own volition.

Aside from evincing some of his hypnotic and mind-reading propensities, Fu’s most fantastic weapon this time is an obedient humanoid, M’goyna. Given that Fu says this apish being was created in part rhrough “vivisection,” the doctor seems to be borrowing from his readings of FRANKENSTEIN here, since the only other time he was seen making humanoids was one experiment in BRIDE.

SHADOW is not one of Rohmer’s more exciting novels in the series. Perhaps Rohmer was seeking to adjust to the demands of the postwar scene by writing something closer to the espionage genre. Still, as always Fu Manchu remains infinitely fascinating even in this quasi-realistic milieu, and at the novel’s conclusion, even Smith mourns when he thinks (erroneously) that the doctor has been fatally shot:

“This was no end for the greatest brain in the world!”