In my review of DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU, I quoted Wikipedia's "Sax Rohmer" essay, which alleged that Rohmer's novel THE EMPEROR OF AMERICA-- first serialized in 1927-- was an abortive attempt to write a sequel to 1917's HAND OF FU MANCHU, in which EMPEROR's female villain would be revealed as Fu's daughter Fah Lo Suee. However, based on the information I culled from the Rohmer biography MASTER OF VILLAINY, the Wiki article seems full of unsubstantiated speculation. The biography establishes a clearer line of circumstances. Collier's Magazine, which had serialized the previous Fu Manchu novels in America, approached Rohmer about a Fu sequel sometime in 1925, possibly in response to the appearance of two silent-movie adaptations of the devil-doctor in the preceding years. Sometime between 1925 and 1927, Rohmer completed one segment of DAUGHTER, but for some reason Collier's wouldn't pay him for individual segments, and Rohmer needed cash. So he offered the magazine a different serial, one for which the editors presumably did pay on a serialized basis, and only after that was finished did Rohmer return to DAUGHTER. It seems obvious to me that EMPEROR must have been a stand-alone concept from the first, and that Rohmer probably would have roughly plotted out part or all of DAUGHTER when he first thought he was going to serialize the whole novel in (say) 1926.
I also commented in my review that I'd read EMPEROR once before and that I didn't remember much about it. On occasion I've reread a work that didn't make much impression on me initially, only to find in the second reading that I'd missed this or that interesting quality in the first read. Not this time, though.
EMPEROR's problem is an exceeding thin premise, possibly not well worked-out because Rohmer devised it in haste. The novel takes place solely in New York, and posits, not unlike the much later teleseries BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, that a labyrinth of caverns exists beneath the city. A vast organization known as "The Zones" has its central HQ within these caverns, and though the organization has sanctuaries in other cities, none of the others are important to the story. The supreme ruler of the Zones is usually called "Great Head Centre," though in one defiant note to the police, the villain assumes the title "Emperor of America."
Though Rohmer tosses out about five potential protagonists, he spends the most time with a policeman, Drake Roscoe, and his everyman-buddy Dr. Stopford, who gets the novel's obligatory romantic arc. Aside from the occasional amusing line, the protagonists are boring, and the villains are made tedious by the fact, despite their immense tactical organization-- the sub-commanders all oversee different parts of New York-- Rohmer never explains what methods the Emperor means to use in conquering America. Thus EMPEROR is a novel that suggests high stakes but fails to make them seem credible.
Possibly because Fu Manchu was on Rohmer's mind at the time, he teases readers with a "Head Centre" who seems to be a yellow-skinned mummy. However, this is a fake-out, since the mummy is a dummy, a prop for the villain. The Emperor uses one Fu-like method to deal out death, that of a poisonous spider, but I don't remember anyone actually getting killed, partly because Rohmer spends so much bloody time with the intricacies of the evil spy network.
The only good thing about EMPEROR OF AMERICA is that its existence allowed Rohmer to get this weak premise out of his system so that he didn't use it in any of the Fu Manchu books. He must have had some affection for his hero Drake Roscoe, for later he made this character an opponent in some if not all installments of a book-series devoted to yet another villainess: the Sumuru saga.
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