Though I'm a fan of (and maybe an apologist for) Sax Rohmer's works, I'd never visited either of the two "Yellow Peril pulps" produced by Popular Publications. In 1935 Popular launched THE MYSTERIOUS WU FANG, and the magazine lasted into 1936 for a total of seven issues. Popular pulled the FANG (sorry) and almost immediately issued another Yellow Peril series, DOCTOR YEN SIN. But the SIN came to an end that same year after just three issues. An essay on Pulp.Net alleges that Sax Rohmer's lawyers may have sent Popular a letter of restraint for both serials, claiming that the pulp publisher was stepping on the Fu Manchu brand.
It should be kept in mind that Rohmer's Devil Doctor was doing pretty well in the 1930s. Rohmer revived the Fu series in 1931 and prior to the publication of WU FANG, the British author had produced the seventh in the series, THE TRAIL OF FU MANCHU, which first saw serialization in 1934 within the "slick" upscale magazine COLLIER'S. I've no information about how well either FANG or SIN sold, but if FANG had been selling badly, why bring in a second Asian villain to take his place? One Wiki quote asserts that SIN might have been less "juvenile" than FANG, but without reading the source material I can only note in passing that FANG's heroic opponents included one teenaged boy, whereas there are no juvenile characters in the third and last SIN novel, MYSTERY OF THE SINGING MUMMIES.
Arguably the title is the best thing about the story. Like a lot of pulp titles, the creator seems to be jamming together disparate subjects to make the reader curious enough to wonder, "How the heck can mummies sing?" The explanation for the phenomenon that causes living human beings into mummified creatures, and the auditory sound associated with the phenomenon, is pretty inventive.
Not so much the title character. Author Donald Keyhoe (best known today for UFOlogy books) copies all the dominant surface characteristics of Fu Manchu. He's a polymath who can speak several languages, can master all of the sciences, and can hypnotize almost anyone. According to an article by a Wold Newton writer, the other two issues don't seem to have given Yen Sin any background at all, and he barely has any character beyond being an Asian mastermind. He commands a criminal organization called the "Invisible Empire" (though the cover uses the term "Invisible Peril").Which begs the question-- how "invisible" can your empire be when most of your henchmen are savage "Yellow" brutes, who might find it hard to blend into even a big metropolis in the US.
Possibly Yen Sin gets short shrift because Keyhoe put his greatest effort into the doctor's opponent Michael Traile, "the Man Who Never Sleeps." Due to a failed brain operation, Traile loses the capacity to sleep normally. Only a special yoga technique of relaxation allows Traile to keep from going mad, and not sleeping makes him something of a polymath who fills the late hours with esoteric studies. That said, he's just as flat a character as Yen Sin, and so are all of the supporting characters.
Keyhoe certainly does not stint on the action; everywhere Traile goes he gets into some running gun-battle. But his crisp prose is somewhat mechanical. I wasn't expecting any of the moodiness of Sax Rohmer here, but I also didn't get the sort of fervid verbal poetry one finds in the purple pen of Norvell "The Spider" Page. In true Fu Manchu fashion Yen Sin gets away in the pages of his final adventure, though probably Keyhoe wrote the story long in advance of the decision to cancel the magazine.
The pulps also had a genius for capturing the uncensored attitudes of the writers and the readers at whom they aimed. But there are no insights here about why there's an eternal race war between Occidental and Oriental-- though Yen Sin's only moment of individuality Yen Sin is a claim that he hates the Japanese as much as the Caucasians. Japanese fifth-columnists play a minor role in MUMMIES, and there are nodding references to the activities of the Axis powers. For what it's worth MUMMIES' antipathy to Germany and Japan is one of the earliest expressions of anti-Axis feeling I've come across in American pop culture. I wasn't really expecting anything on a par with the best of Sax Rohmer, and in a way I'm kind of glad that he's not as easy to emulate as a lot of critics might suppose.
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