THE READING RHEUM: PRESIDENT FU MANCHU (1936)

                                                     

PRESIDENT FU MANCHU, the eighth work in the Fu Manchu series, shows author Sax Rohmer continuing his project to make the doctor’s schemes more global in nature—and you don’t get much more global than the villain trying to become the de facto President of the United States. Naturally, this goal can only be accomplished through a political pawn. Still, throughout the novel Fu’s subordinates call him “president,” and since they did not use that title in earlier novels, the clear implication that Fu Manchu’s candidate will reshape the world according to the doctor’s will, by harnessing the resources of the most powerful country on the planet.

As BRIDE takes place entirely in France, all of PRESIDENT’s action takes place in the U.S., though it takes Rohmer about thirty pages to establish that the specific locale is New York. Smith is the only native of Great Britain involved, as he’s given some special dispensation to command various American agents. Most of the novel is told through the POV of young agent Mark Hepburn, though some scenes are told from the viewpoints of Fu’s agents. These include Moya Adair, a young Irish widow (and the novel’s obligatory romantic interest for the leading man), and a mysterious genius known as “the Memory Man.” Neither character has been subjected to the irreversible brainwashing chemicals seen in BRIDE, though Fu does make use of more limited mind-wiping techniques. Fu and his subordinates acknowledge that their resources are limited, in part because of Nayland Smith’s dogged pursuit. At some point, however, Fu must have managed to set up a gold-making operation like the one destroyed in TRAIL, for he’s got enough money to fund a populist organization, “the League of Good Americans,” to the end of creating a political puppet to assume the Presidency.

The apparent candidate of the League is an uncouth but charismatic speaker named Harvey “Bluebeard” Bragg. The name by itself bears slight resemblance to real-life populist demagogue Huey Long, and it’s not impossible that Rohmer may have read another fictional treatment of Long in Sinclair Lewis’s IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE, published the year before PRESIDENT. Rohmer, however, does not devote much time to Bragg’s character, for Fu’s long con involves using the quasi-fascist demagogue to promote a different candidate, one Salvaletti. This means that PRESIDENT beat out the main plot of Richard Condon’s MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE by over twenty years. And in addition to sorting out Fu’s primary plot, Nayland Snith must also figure out why the doctor seeks to silence a priest, the Abbott Donegal, who poses some obscure threat to the League of Good Americans.

But though PRESIDENT fully reporesents Rohmer’s commitment to more extensive ploys, in one sense it feels more like the first three novels, with their trope of “there’s a yellow or brown boogieman under every English bed.” Rohmer’s novels of the 1930s ease off this trope somewhat, and even allowed a couple of (very minor) characters of color who didn’t turn out to be minions of the Si-Fan. But early in the novel Smith meets one of Donegal’s functionaries, James Richet, and later makes the following extraordinary (even for 1936) pronouncement:

There’s color somewhere. I can’t place its exact shade.

And, as it happens, Smith’s instincts are correct, for Rohmer tells the reader that one of Richet’s ancestors was a “Kanaka” (i.e., Hawaiian-derived), as well as mentioning that Richet’s racial heritage barred him from success in white society, leading him to work for both criminal societies and eventually for the Si-Fan. Rohmer wastes little time on this minor pawn, whom the devil-doctor exterminates in the course of things. However, it wouldn’t be hard to read the novel as a racist diatribe. The first three novels often excoriated Asians by calling them “yellow,” but rarely used epithets (with the exception ot the word “dago” in RETURN). I counted six uses of the word “chink” in PRESIDENT, though I note that all of these epithets are spoken by white Americans. This may signify that Rohmer simply believed that Americans were more openly impolite than his own people.

There are, to be sure, some moments in which Rohmer seeks to stress that Fu Manchu and his people do not represent all Asians, as when one monologue asserts that “the Chinaman is a law-abiding citizen.” And then there’s PRESIDENT’s “shady lady” Lola Dumas, who’s attached to the retinues of both Bragg and Salvaletti. Lola is apparently a major player in New York society, together with her father Emmanuel, who “claimed… to be descended from the brilliant quadroon who created the Three Musketeers” (i..e., Alexandre Dumas). Unacceptable though the word “quadroon” may be today, Rohmer seems to mean it only as a descriptive term, not least because he’s extolling the writer’s genius. Later, Fu Manchu himself seemingly confirms the legacy of these latter-day Dumas descendants, when he meditates on Lola’s fitness to serve him:

She is amorous and she is compassionate—it is the Negroid strain…

Again, these will sound like left-handed compliments to a modern ear, as does Moya’s curious opinion that Lola reminds her of “a beautiful, evil priestess of voodoo.” As it happens, it’s not clear whether or not either Lola’s amorousness or compassion renders her unfit for service to Fu Manchu, but he does choose to replace her for a time with Moya Adair. Lola doesn’t play a big role in the story. Her ultimate destiny is that she’s intended to be First Lady to the puppet-President. One wonders if Rohmer may have given American culture too much credit, to assume that voters of the thirties would be okay with a First Lady who acknowledged Negroid heritage.

Fu has a more complicated relationship with Moya Adair. He suborns her by kidnapping her young son Robbie and returning him to his mother on the condition of her continued service. Yet when he visits Moya’s home to give her orders, he’s friendly enough to the boy that the child calls him “Yellow Uncle.” (Fu’s opinion of the name is not recorded.) Yet, despite having every reason to despise the doctor, she tells Hepburn that Fu Manchu “thinks on a plane which we simply can’t understand.”

Because Moya discharges her duties to the doctor without turning on him as do many of his other female pawns, Fu Manchu actually confesses a certain human failing on his part, as well as taking her into his confidence in a minor way:

I do not trust you—no woman is to be trusted in a world of men. Yet because I am a man too, and very lonely in this my last battle to crush what the West calls civilization—I will advance you one step further into my plans.

This scene mirrors an earlier one in which Fu confers with his aged comrade Sam Pak, who serves the doctor implicitly, but declines the master’s invitation to join Fu in the state of agelessness. Without overestimating Fu’s relationship with either Sam Pak or Moya, both scenes depict Fu Manchu with a tragic air, a Tamerlane born in an era that regards him as only a common felon. This may well explain why he does not seek to impose brainwashing upon either his rebellious daughter Fah Lo Suee or his runaway bride Fleurette: he wants willing companions in his quest for a new world order. He knows that Moya is not such a companion; that she only serves him under coercion. Yet, in the novel’s most extraordinary scene, he personally utilizes his great medical skills to save Moya’s young son from a diphtheria infection, even though this deed of noblesse oblige places him in danger of capture. Of course, being Fu Manchu, he escapes the law with ridiculous ease, though in the final chapter he suffers yet another equivocal death, this time being swept over Niagara Falls while under attack by his more rebellious servant, the Memory Man.

As for Fu’s master plan to co-opr the U.S. Presidency, the Abbot Donegal, who disappears for most of the book, re-appears at the end to reveal to the multitudes the true backer of the League of Good Americans. Yet Donegal’s most telling strike may be his sabotage of the celebrity marriage of Lola and Salvaletti, for in his big speech the Abbot reveals that Salvaletti is both a de-frocked priest and a man with a previous wife. Salvaletti then commits suicide, leaving this reader with the impression that he’s the one who should’ve been nicknamed “Bluebeard.”

PRESIDENT FU MANCHU, though not one of Rohmer’s more engrossing thrillers, may well be the closest he ever came to elaborating his beliefs about race and culture. I don’t think it would have occurred to the author to ameliorate readers hostile to his character via tokenism: say, by giving Nayland Smith a brilliant young Chinese aide. Rather, Rohmer’s overall view seems to be that of a later author’s idea of an inevitable “clash of civilizations,” if one may extrapolate from a passage in the next-to-last chapter:

…[the sound] rose weirdly on the night, as though long-dead gods of the red man, returning, lamented the conquest of the white.”

MYTHCOMICS: "AND THERE WILL BE WORLDS ANEW" (DOCTOR STRANGE ANNUAL #1, 1976)

Since its inception, Marvel’s DOCTOR STRANGE has been such a triumph of visual design that a fair number of quality artists—Colan, Rogers, Starlin, and a host of others—sought to play baroque games of form and shape in the Sanctum That Ditko Drew. That said, though Ditko’s visual rendition of the doctor’s very strange worlds remains unsurpassed, the feature’s scripting was usually not quite as distinguished. Thus, though I’ve argued for the mythic depth of many tales from both of STRANGE’s co-creators Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, I’ve found little complexity in the Lee-Ditko stoiies of the “master of the mystic arts.” It’s been suggested that one of the two creators took some inspiration from the sixties bestsellers of alleged Tibetan monk T. Lobsang Rampa, insofar as those books introduced Western readers to complex concepts (however borrowed) of Tibetan sorcery. But if Rampa was the proximate source for DOCTOR STRANGE, neither Ditko nor Lee pursued any other aspects of esoteric tradition, Eastern or Western. While I would not have wanted to see the creativity of the feature straight-jacketed by adherence to occult doctrine—a failing of Steve Englehart’s version of the character— some metaphysical motifs might have kept the feature from having been so dominated by two principal plots: either Doc Strange goes to some alien dimension to fight tyrannical rulers there, or he defends Earth from being invaded by such extradimensional forces.

“And There Will be Worlds Anew” was ostensibly the sole creation of artist P. Craig Russell (more on that matter later), and there’s no more esoteric tradition in either his art or script than in most other adventures of Marvel’s Sorcerer Supreme. However, Russell does pattern his stand-alone story on a metaphysical motif common to Western art: the close association of Beauty and Death. Many Russell works make no bones about his narrative inspirations, often adapted from or patterned after famous (and public-domain) operas like PELLEAS AND MELISANDE and Wagner’s RING continuity. In re-reading ‘Worlds,” I didn’t pin down any specific narratives on which Russell might have modeled his tale, though I did think of Poe’s little-known story “The Island of the Fay,” in which the main character fantasizes seeing the same scene from two viewpoints: a beautiful faerie-bower and a desolate wasteland.

For the first eight pages, “Worlds” isn’t much different from the average Doctor Strange story. Brooding in his domicile after a quarrel with his lover Clea, the magician receives tidings that she’s been kidnapped by an unknown entity. The hero seeks out “the Temple of Man,” which is apparently mainly a big old occult library. Strange’s characterization carries more currents of self-doubt than is usual, but it’s not significantly different from the Strange of more formulaic stories. And after the magician’s quest takes him to a never-visited dimension called Phaseworld, his first action is to engage in battle with the dimension’s ruler Lectra, much as the doctor would in many previous adventures. Lectra only wins the conflict by a standard villain-trope: she shows the hero an image of his beloved in captivity, and he’s forced to surrender to preserve Clea’s life.

However, with the standard Marvel pyrotechnics out of the way, Russell then devotes the remainder of “Worlds” to portraying the beauties of Phaseworld. The two mages set out for Lectra’s home city, Allandra, transported across “the currents of space” (and a relatively mundane-looking ocean) in a mystical ship. On the way a sea serpent attacks, and Strange wounds the creature before Lectra can explain that the beast is meant to guide them through stormy seas. Lectra thus gets to strut her stuff by forcing the storms to cease, conjuring up the Biblical motif. Once the seas are calm, the complex golden city of Allandra rises from the depths.

Russell makes Allandra a true faery-dwelling, all spires and minarets, with no indication that it was ever meant to be lived in. Up to this point Strange has seen no sentient beings except Lectra and a ship-crew of undead sailors. But the city has even fewer signs of life, causing Strange to think, “It is magnificence itself, a city of floating form and sculpture. And yet, beneath the fascination, I sense death.”

Once the two sorcerers arrive at the palace, Lectra outlines her plan to make Strange her consort. She doesn’t have the usual motive of wanting to spawn offspring, though, for her purpose is to meld her sorcerous powers with those of the hero in order to preserve Allandra from doom. She attributes the decay of her world to her sister Phaydra, who then makes an appearance, and the latter remains silent in contrast to Lectra’s volubility. 

However, the silent woman keeps company with a type of bird almost iconic in ballet and opera: a lovely white swan. The swan, name of Tempus, is able to speak for Phaydra, accusing Lectra of beginning their world’s doom by usurping the throne for “vainglorious lusts.” The two sisters battle magically. Strange interrupts the fight, wanting nothing but his missing beloved. The swan metamorphoses into an angel-winged man, and reveals that Clea was never Lectra’s prisoner. The revelation causes Lectra to hurl a spell at Tempus, but when he deflects, her magic destroys a “soul mirror,” leading to the deaths of both sisters and the world of Allandra. Strange alone escapes and returns to his own world.

The conjoined but opposing natures of the sisters is the dominant theme here, though only once does Russell gloss those natures, having the hunky swan-stud state that Lectra “possesses the evil of the mind” while Phaydra “holds the truth and good of the heart.” I’d like to say that this interpretation is supported by the Classical Greek names Russell invokes, but his characters don’t parallel in any meaningful way the stories told, respectively, of Classical Electra and Classical Phaedra. My best guess is that in the story of Electra, she represents Thanatos, since she’s willing to sacrifice Orestes so that their mutual father is avenged, while Phaedra is Eros, given that her passion for her stepson would’ve harmed no one had it not been forestalled by the priggishness of Hippolytus. But again—just a guess.

The original story appears with both scripting and co-plotting credits for Marv Wolfman, but in a COMICS JOURNAL interview Russell denied that Wolfman had done anything but provide dialogue. Many years later Russell persuaded Marvel to re-publish the story with his revisions to the art and the script, and as I have not read this version I cannot comment. Still, Russell’s art nouveau approach to the master magician was at least an improvement on the character’s generally-neglected metaphysical potential.

MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 3

                             
The last comics-item I rated as an inconsummate null-myth was 1965’s “THE HAUNTED ISLAND” (CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN #43). It’s without question a story whose constituent parts don’t cohere into a pleasing whole, but it also illustrates my new distinction regarding concrescence, in that its parts don’t even relate to one another within the narrative.



For purposes of comparison with other narratives, I’ll identify ISLAND’s master thread as being that of “hero must confront evil counterpart.” To be sure, the story probably came about for extrinsic reasons of stoking the feature’s sales, in that editor Murray Boltinoff probably made the decision to give the heroes new uniforms, and assigned Bill Finger to come up with a rationale in story-form. Finger’s oddball solution was to have the “Challs” (as they were informally called) kidnapped by five mutated scientists, all of whom considered that they lived “on borrowed time”as did the quartet of adventurers. I mentioned that the imagery of ISLAND is all over the place, best exemplified by a mutant who looks like the Frankenstein Monster in a Beatle wig (the haircut even gets an explicit comment from one of the heroes). Yet even more damaging to the story as a whole is that the mutants initially want the heroes to subject themselves to mutation willingly—meaning that they’ll no longer be the heroic figures that the mutants found appealing. When the Challs decline, the mutants threaten to put them in suspended animation like the rest of their collection—though both scenarios would seem to render the idea of giving the heroes new costumes nugatory. Thus ISLAND demonstrates both a state of inconsummation and a poor level of mythopoeic concrescence.

To remain focused on the “evil counterpart” thread, a more effective example is 1969’s “AND SO MY WORLD ENDS” (JLA #71). Like the Challengers story, this one focuses upon an ensemble of heroes, though one among them, the Manhunter of Mars, receives “special guest star” billing. J’onn J’onzz convinces the heroes of Earth to follow him to Mars to prevent a Martian threat to Earth, but even the Martian doesn’t know that a civil war between Mars’ two races has decimated both sides, leaving only handsfuls of survivors on both sides. Green Martian J’onn meets his White Martian opposite number in battle, and though J’onn prevails, the victory is pyrrhic, since his civlization is all but perished. This is an entirely consummate story insofar as it gives the reader a feeling of completeness and satisfaction, even if it may incorporate one or two lapses in logic. But the master-thread of “hero’s evil counterpart” is only adequately explored, though a subordinate thread about the futility of war provides ample support, giving WORLD a fair level of mythopoeic concrescence.

   Finally, the 1947 story “THE INJUSTICE SOCIETY OF THE WORLD” provides an example of both consummate status and a high level of concrescence. In my review I wrote:

Other comics-features had played around with the idea of pitting heroes, whether in solo features or in groups, against teams of villains, so the basic idea of the Injustice Society was nothing new in 1947. What makes this story a "mythcomic," though, is Kanigher's attention to making the villain-group a formidable reflection of the good-guy group.
Much of the time, the JSA heroes won their battles a little too easily, partly because so many of their foes were just ordinary thugs and swindlers. I've argued elsewhere that one has to respect the gumption of commonplace crooks in challenging do-gooders who had godlike powers, but it still didn't usually give rise to many memorable battles.

I won’t repeat the various reasons I stated for validating the mythopoeic discourse of INJUSTICE, though, like the other two stories analyzed here, the tale’s not free of flaws and is not one of the more“sophisticated” even within the superhero genre. But it provides a good example of a story notable for just one strong master-thread, and nearly no subordinate threads in the mythopoeic vein.

CONSUMMATION AND CONCRESCENCE

My recent essays on the concept of the master-thread have sparked some re-consideration of the titular categories.

When I wrote CONSUMMATING PASSIONS in 2011, I may have contemplated the notion of using consummation to explain certain operations of fictional narrative, more or less in the same fashion that I now utilize "concrescence." However, I didn’t end up using “consummation” as a consistent term over the years. I now believe that the term is too static. Going by the standard usage of the word and its opposite, a work can only be consummate or inconsummate insofar as the parts of the narrative do or do not work in harmony to give the reader a sense of “completion.” PASSIONS, though, was written before I began formulating my concepts of the four potentialities, and of discourse between the various *quanta * of those potentialities.

In contrast, concrescence is not about the relationship of the parts to a hypothetical whole; it concerns the relation of parts to other parts within the narrative, in a rough parallel to the mundane medical use of the word. One part, as I’ve written at the beginning of the master-thread series, is always dominant within the narrative, and the other parts are woven around this central thread. The thread-metaphor helps to explain how a given narrative may be strong within a given potentiality, mythopoeic or otherwise, even if the narrative develops only the superordinate master thread but no subordinate threads. I’ll provide further explication of the proper terminological relationships of these two categories in my next essay.

MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2

                               

To my knowledge, no written work of fiction provides a mythopepic discourse denser than that of Herman Melville’s MOBY DICK. This sprawling tale is replete with many threads of mythopoeic vertical meaning, ranging from the relationship of white men to colored men (which theme preoccupied Leslie Fiedler) to the nature of fate (Fedallah’s MACBETH-like prophecies). But all of these meaning-threads are subordinate to the master thread, which, if removed, would unravel the whole kit and kaboodle. The master thread for MOBY DICK consists of the myth of the Hunter and the Hunted—with the additional fillip that the Hunted is either God or the agent of God’s inscrutable will, so that the Hunt itself is inevitably doomed.

All of the subordinate vertical threads of MOBY DICK are so well developed that the author could have made stand-alone stories out of any of them. This is not generally the case, however. Of the thousands of other narratives that possess strong mythopoeic meaning, most of them possess no more than a single strong master thread.

Case in point: CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. When I wrote my mythcomicsreview of CRISIS, I was more than a little aware of the serial’s numerous flaws, from the bland scripting of Marv Wolfman to the drably functional manner in which the story tossed together nearly every famous or semi-famous character in DC Comics history. Those subplots that even came close to vertical meaning were frequently botched, as with a maudlin encounter between Kamandi—Jack Kirby’s “Planet of the Apes” swipe—and Solovar, one of DC’s seemingly endless supply of intelligent gorillas. However—there was one master thread I discerned, one in which Wolfman built upon the “devilish” character of Krona, and contrasted this character’s impiety with a “holy trinity” of characters implicated in the death of the old cosmos and the birth of the new.

On the more positive side, some master-threads receive support in unpredictable ways. Jack Kirby’s NEW GODS saga, reviewed here, has one obvious master-thread: the prophecy of an eventual confrontation between the tyrant Darkseid and the hero Orion. I wasn’t entirely pleased with Kirby’s years-later wrap-up of his epic series. But even though the author went down a somewhat unsatisfying path, HUNGER DOGS wasn’t without mythopoeic meaning in itself.

But I’ve recently noticed one particular subordinate thread, one so subtle that one could barely even assign a didactic meaning. In my review I had no space to examine the curious relationship between Darkseid and his mother Heggra.

The reader only three things about the wizened queen: (1) that she rules Apokolips before Darkseid ascends to the throne, (2) that her influence obliges Darkseid, against his will, to wed a noblewoman named Tigra, who ends up being the mother of Orion, and (3) at some time, Darkseid has his mother killed, probably because she blocked his rise to power.

But in recent months, I noticed that the given names of Heggra and Tigra are not dissimilar, suggesting a symbolic identity between them. Visually, they’re opposites, for Tigra is lean and given to overt violence, while Heggra is sedate, like a brooding hen sitting on her “hegg.” But despite these differences they collude to create Orion, whom Darkseid will make the mistake of casting out. The result is that Orion becomes dedicated to his father’s defeat, and though Orion’s primary mission is to keep Darkseid from gaining the Anti-Life Equation, it would not be incorrect to say that the conflict of father and son ends up avenging the maltreatment of two maternal figures. It’s a subordinate vertical thread that in no way diminishes the master thread of the father-son conflict, but because of this mini-discourse, the master thread is made yet denser and richer.

MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 1

In essays such as THE LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD PART II, I’ve compared the organization of fictional narratives to the ways in which students are taught to structure their compositions around a “theme statement.” I never developed that line of thought, but of late it’s struck me that there’s a parallel between the general idea of a “theme statement” and my concept of the “focal presence,” insofar as both are organizing principles. But there is a salient distinction between the two.

According to my lit-crit system, the focal presence is allied to a narrative’s lateral meaning, the combination of the kinetic and the dramatic, of the things that physically happen to characters and how they feel about it. The focal presence denotes the narrative’s centricity, which in keeping with my observations in STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS, does not require vertical meaning in order to engage a reader’s conviction.

In contrast, any “theme statement”—a term I will soon replace with one more apt for my purposes—must correlate principally with vertical meaning. This meaning, as I’ve mentioned earlier, can be represented by didactically presented ideas, mythopoeically presented symbols, or (in the words of Janis Joplin) a “combination of the two.” I’ve frequently pictured these vertical meanings as either being “over” or “under” a narrative’s lateral meaning, but for current purposes maybe it might be better to imagine them as many disparate threads running through the (potentially) labyrinthine structure of the narrative. A single narrative can incorporate more than one vertical meaning. However, to be coherent said narrative needs what I’ll henceforth call a “master thread.”

Since standard theme statements emphasize didactic meanings, I won’t spend a lot of time on that topic. I'll confine myself to stating that two given narratives can both possess the requisite master thread, but one can be better developed than the other (for instance, Upton Sinclair’s socialist diatribe in THE JUNGLE is far less compelling than Charles Dickens’ “anti-utilitarian argument” in HARD TIMES—not simply because I personally favor one over the other, but because the latter possessed greater intellectual elaboration than the former.

I have a great deal more to say about the ways mythopoeic master threads disport themselves, coming up in Part 2.

THE READING RHEUM: THE TRAIL OF FU MANCHU (1934)

                                                          

,I noted earlier that BRIDE OF FU MANCHU was atypical in that Sax Rohmer constructed it like a traditional notvel, rather than being a concatenation of episodes. Until I re-read TRAIL OF FU MANCHU, though, I didn’t realize that the author must have formulated at least some of the plot-threads of TRAIL in mind when he wrote BRIDE. For instance, during one of Fu’s many BRIDE-lectures to viewpoint character Alan Sterling, the doctor discourses a bit on alchemy. The subject has no affect on BRIDE’s plot, but it’s of particular consequence in TRAIL.

Obviously, given Rohmer’s treatment of Karameneh in the first three books, it was perhaps a given that TRAIL would deal in part with the aftermath of Alan Sterling “stealing” the bride of the devil-doctor, Fleurette, long-lost daughter of Karameneh and Doctor Petrie. Fu Manchu kidnaps Fleurette here just as he abducted Karamenehh in Book Three, and by the book’s end the doctor swears not to do so again, just as he (largely) left Karameneh alone following her abduction. (In essence, whenever Fu promised to leave someone alone, it meant that author Rohmer didn’t intend to make any great use of said character in future.)

TRAIL isn’t as tightly written as BRIDE, but it has a different distinction. Every previous Fu-book used a single viewpoint character, but Book Seven is the first one to utilize multiple viewpoints. Alan Sterling doesn’t tell any of the story until eighty pages in, a couple of viewpoint characters are throwaway figures, and a couple of others are “firsts:” Nayland Smith narrates a chapter or two and Fleurette has the distinction of being the first female character in a Fu-novel to get her own chapter. All of the transitions work well, and though the plot is looser than that of the previous book, only one episode—an early subplot in which Fah Lo Suee fakes her death for no clear reason—doesn’t cohere with the rest of the narrative.

Another Fah-related subplot has become a major part of the Fu Manchu mythology. Fah and Nayland Smith don’t seem to have crossed paths prior to her introduction in Book Three, and Rohmer barely has the two interact afterward. Then, toward the end of this novel, Fah Lo Suee --despite having styled herself as a person of “light loves”—suddenly announches, in front of her father, her father’s minions, and several captives, including Smith—that she’s loved Smith since she first laid eyes upon him. The announcement proves so arresting that even Fu Manchu, who’s rarely surprised by anything, admits that he didn’t see this one coming—perhaps mirroring the astonishinent of Rohmer’s regular readers. The only one who doesn’t react much is Nayland Smith, though he’s rather preoccupied at the time. Not only does he witness Fu executing his disloyal daughter (though of course she’s back soon enough), the doctor also fully plans to slay Smith and his allies this time, and only Smith’s resourcefulness saves the day, making for one of Rohmer’s most exciting action-sequences.

In addition, Rohmer also experiments with bringing a little more verisimilitude to his adventurous sage. Though Fu Manchu escapes police captivity with ridiculous ease in BRIDE—much as he did in Book One—this time he isn’t able to poof away like an Arabian genie, nor can he conjure up bevies of scorpions and dacoits out of nothingness as he always had before. Smith doesn’t explain exactly what he’s done to cut Fu off from his Si-Fan network. Yet somehow, as the novel opens the policeman has managed to make Europe hot for the villain, which is one reason Fu returns to England, to kidnap Fleurtte as a future bargaining chip. More central to the mastermind’s plan, though, is his attempt to overcome his financial embarrassment by manufacturing gold after the fashion of the ancient alchemists. Rohmer is understandably vague about the process, though Fu makes an intriguing suggestion that the operation involves the sacrifice of human flesh. Aside from the technique of gold-making and some of the mental tricks performed by the two Asian evildowers, TRAIL departs from most of the “mad scientist” tropes seen in BRIDE. And though Rohmer is never all that wrapped up in the realities of running a criminal empire, it’s amusing to speculate that Fu’s expensive BRIDE laboratory may have caused him to overspend his resources, as much as any action taken by Nayland Smith.

Late in the novel Smith says to his confidante, “Seems like old times, eh, Petrie?” But early in the book Rohmer shows a sedulous determination to remind readers of the long history between the policeman and the super-criminal. One chapter references “the Zayat Kiss,” and one of Fu’s minor associates from the 1910s, John Ki, returns for a few scenes. The novel’s greater emphasis on verisimilitude has a consequence: the characters, particularly Fu Manchu, are not quite as deeply mythic as they are elsewhere. But TRAIL does boast one deeply resonant scene, which improves upon a similar event in HAND OF FU MANCHU. In that novel, Fu Manchu needs an operation, and he forces Petrie and another doctor to do the deed. In TRAIL, Fu’s alchemical stratagem is destroyed, but he gets a physical rebirth thanks to Petrie. To save Fleurette—who, once again, never shares any scenes with the Oriental schemer—Petrie must save Fu Manchu from the ravages of old age by administering the exilir vitae. Just as the aggrieved physician approaches his patient, Fu does his mind-reading trick, once more disclosing the fact that, no matter what crimes he commits, he’s always the most interesting man in the room:

“’O mighty Caesar! Dost thy lie so low?’ I observe, Doctor Petrie, that this beautiful passage from an otherwise dull play is present in your mind… You honor me.”