THE READING RHEUM: EMPEROR FU MANCHU (1959)

In my reviews of the Fu Manchu series, I’ve largely avoided references to the life of Sax Rohmer. But it’s well night impossible not to acknowledge that the final act of Rohmer’s most famous character saw publication the same year that the author passed from this mortal coil.

I believe Rohmer must have devoted considerable thought to Fu’s finale. For one thing, even though the author made his fame with a Chinese character, the settings of the stories never went further east than Persia. The author had more experience with the Middle East than the Far East, and thus Rohmer’s readers knew the latter only through Fu’s miscreant servants—Burmese dacoits, Sea-Dyaks from Borneo. So it can’t be coincidence that the final novel showcases Nayland Smith finally taking the fight to the doctor’s home ground.

Moreover, Smith chooses to steal a march on his perennial foe. The policeman receives intelligence that the doctor may have initiated a new project in Szechuan Province, and although Smith obviously has no authority in China, he takes it upon himself to send a spy to gather information. Smith selects an American agent, Tony McKay, who not only grew up in China with his family, but can pass as Chinese. Early in the novel Rohmer quixotically suggests that McKay’s Celtic heritage gives the agent some quasi-Chinese features. The author evidently thought better of this idea, since eighty pages into the novel he finally mentions that McKay’s maternal grandmother was Chinese. McKay also bears a grudge against the Communist regime, given that his family was dispossessed by the current government, but despite his long absence he knows the language and the ways of the people. In earlier novels there are a couple of isolated incidents where Caucasians successfully masquerade as Asians, as when Smith himself dons the disguise of an Egyptian. But no Caucasian masters the skill of trans-racial impostures more ably than does Fu Manchu himself, who often finds ways to pass as, say, a Frenchman or a German. Thus, when Tony McKay infiltrates Szechuan in the guise of fisherman Chi Foh, and even fools the doctor himself in terms of Chi Foh’s Chinese identity, there’s a sense of the tables being turned at last.

The sojourn in China also brings the Fu Manchu saga full circle in a political sense. In the first novel Rohmer very vaguely associates Fu’s organization—not yet called the Si-Fan—with a movement known as “New China.” Rohmer may have been thinking of the period Wikipedia calls the “New Administration” of China’s late Qing Dynasty, during which the rulers attempted to respond to the Boxer Uprisings with an attempt at constitutional government. Interestingly, the dynasty is said to end the very year Rohmer pubished his first Fu-story, in 1912. Chinese Communism does not seem to become viable until 1919, so it seems unlikely that Rohmer was thinking of that movement. The author says little if anything about Communist rule in China until 1948’s SHADOW OF FU MANCHU, so it seems likely that Rohmer began putting anti-Communist sentiments in Fu’s mouth in response to the general anti-Communist feeling in Western culture. In the later novels Fu makes clear that he would like to overthrow Communism, both in his country and elsewhere, and EMPEROR makes it clear that Fu speaks as a Chinese aristocrat, when he says, “Communism, with its vulgarity, its glorification of the worker, I shall sweep from the earth!” Yet in the final novel the master of the Si-Fan operates openly in China, with full cooperation from the local officials. When the novel’s lead female speaks of how the Communists regard Fu Manchu, she states that, “They treat him like the emperors used to be treated.”

Said female is Yueh Hua, a young Chinese girl who attaches herself to McKay, whose Western chivalry won’t allow him to neglect a woman in need, even when he’s trying to perform an intelligence mission for Nayland Smith. Yueh Hua proves herself one of Rohmer’s more courageous and resourceful women, in part because she’s got her own mission. Both young people travel by fishing-boat on Chinese watercourses, insuring that romance will bloom even while both are pursued by Fu’s forces, since the doctor suspects “Chi Foh” of being a Soviet spy. At the same eighty-page mark where McKay admits having had a Chinese grandmother, he finds that Yueh Hua is only half-Chinese herself. She too was raised in China but had a Western name, Jeanie Cameron-Gordon, and her mission all along has been an attempt to find her missing father, who just happens to be a scientist abducted by Fu Manchu.

To be sure, though, the rescue of Doctor Cameron-Gordon is a subplot, and for once Fu’s own plot is more preventive than offensive. The activity Smith detects is Fu gearing up to obliterate a Soviet installation in Szechuan, because the Soviets are messing around with plague-germs. Despite having once planned to unleash plague on the Western countries back in BRIDE OF FU MANCHU, the doctor doesn’t approve of the Soviets doing the same thing. But since he doesn’t want to overtly defy Russia, he concocts a roundabout plan to cultivate a horde of “Cold Men”—dead men brought back to life by Fu’s science—and to “accidentally” unleash them on the installation. Though other novels use the term “zombie” metaphorically, and ISLAND even repeats the commonplace notion that such creatures are merely drugged but still living men, here Rohmer yields to the temptation to have his emperor literally bring the dead back to life.

Yet, though in the novel’s final chapter Fu succeeds in thwarting the Soviet scheme, the Russians end up dealing a possibly mortal blow to the Master of the Si-Fan. It just so happens that, coincident with the investigations of Smith and McKay, a Soviet spy named Skoblov pilfers the Si-Fan’s most valuable resource: a coded register, revealing the identities of all of Fu Manchu’s foremost agents.

I won’t go into the specifics of the way that Smith gets his hands on this resource. Suffice to say that the novel ends with the suggestion that British justice may at last be able to triumph over the international cabal. Fu Manchu makes one final attempt to convince Smith that they ought to fight on the same side against the Communists, but predictably Smith makes him no promises. Rohmer does allow his villain the liberty of one last vanishing act: during the Cold Men’s attack on the installation, they really do get out of control, and Fu apparently disappears in a conflagration. Thus Rohmer crafts an ambivalent ending. Proponents of law-and-order can choose to believe that Smith's dogged efforts are finally rewarded with the Si-Fan's destruction, while those who have "sympathy for the devil" can please themselves that the rebellious spirit of Fu Manchu can never be put to rest.