THE READING RHEUM: THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE (1886)

The biggest mystery of Stevenson’s classic story is not the identity of the repulsive little man known as Mister Hyde. Within a few years of publication that identity became pellucidly clear even to people who never read the story, thanks to stage and film adaptations. The mystery is, why is Stevenson’s actual story not as popular as the adaptations? After all, though DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN were often very freely adapted, one still sees raconteurs occasionally going to the original texts for inspiration. With JEKYLL AND HYDE, not so much.

Most versions do capture, or try to capture, the sense of Hyde as a sort of Victorian predecessor to Sigmund Freud’s theory of “the id,” the part of the human psyche that simply “wants what it wants when it wants it.” Later raconteurs usually don’t favor the idea that Hyde is physically smaller than Jekyll. Sometimes this aspect is attributed to Hyde’s incarnation of Jekyll’s younger self (said to have been “wild” in college), sometimes to his being a sort of “troglodytic” throwback. Obviously, in stage and screen, this would have been impossible to convey without using two actors, thus obviating the challenge of seeing a performer essay both the “good” and “bad” sides of humankind. But in this case, size is not the main problem with Stevenson’s text.

The fact that Hyde’s identity is no longer mysterious has a deleterious effect on most readings of the prose tale, but that too is not the greatest difficulty. It’s closer to the truth to say that Stevenson, while he calls Hyde “evil,” is deliberately obscure about what evil acts the little fiend commits. Aside from losing his temper twice in public—trampling a little girl and killing an old man—one never sees what acts of reprehensible gratification Hyde carries out when he usurps Jekyll’s body. It’s beyond doubt that this was a conscious choice on Stevenson’s part, whether from fears of censorship or simply from the desire to make his readers use their imaginations.

But the story might have flourished with all of these flaws, had it not been for the biggest one: Hyde has no voice. Solid citizens like Lanyon report some of the things he’s said, for Hyde is certainly capable of ordinary human speech, and Jekyll’s notes attempt to convey his alter ego’s perverse nature. But, once again drawing comparisons to the creations of Stoker and Shelley, those two worthies give their monsters character through their own speech. Proportionately speaking, Dracula isn’t “on stage” much more than Hyde is, but the king-vampire has just enough dialogue to make his character indelible. And though the Frankenstein Monster’s adaptations don’t often favor the grandiloquence of Shelley’s creation, even mute versions of the Monster seem suffused with the simple sentiment, “Did I beseech thee, O my maker, to create me?”

Adaptations of Hyde not only have to enlarge upon his career of self-gratification, they almost have to create Hyde’s presence out of whole cloth. Stevenson only gives the reader the sense of Hyde’s abominable temper, his spite toward the “ego” side of his nature, but Hyde does not come alive as a character. Indeed, in Jekyll’s final confession, he characterizes Hyde as if the latter were some “inorganic” process. That notion works fine for the alien beings of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. A reader who wants to “get to know his id,” though, can only come away from Stevenson’s JEKYLL AND HYDE with a sense of vague disappointment.

CHALLENGER VS. DEFENDER PT. 3

In ENSEMBLES ASSEMBLE and related essays, I’ve noted that though most focal ensembles are composed of characters who share the same cause, there are assorted exceptions. In SUBS AND COES PT. 2,  I noted that on occasion some teams, such as the Teen Titans and the Omega Men, who have a “stealth enemy” who functions as part of the ensemble for a time even though said traitor plans to destroy the other characters. Thus all the stories in which Terra pretends to be a superhero still place her, like the other Titans, in the narrative position of a defender, while whatever villains she battles alongside her team are the challengers of those stories. Only when Terra reveals her true intentions and joins with Deathstroke to destroy the heroes does she become a challenger-type.

“Opposed ensembles” present a knottier problem. Most such ensembles consist of two opposed characters who receive equal emphasis within the narrative. This stands in contrast to the many narratives built around a defender battling a formidable challenger (Sherlock Holmes/Professor Moriarty) or a challenger meeting his match in a canny defender (Dracula/ Van Helsing). Typically, opposed ensembles share a similar dynamic in terms of engaging the audience’s sympathies. For instance, in viewing the final fight in FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN, most viewers are likely to see the Wolf Man as a relative “hero,” given that the Frankenstein Monster looks like he’s about to do nasty things to a helpless female. But the entire narrative shows that both monsters are equally dangerous to humankind. Thus, even though the monsters end up fighting one another, in a greater sense both of them are challengers to the peace of humankind, whose defenders are represented here by a handful of imperiled characters.

Most of the opposed ensembles I’ve cited concentrate only upon two characters, where one is strongly antipathetic and the other may be somewhat sympathetic. M. NIght Shyamalin's GLASS is a rare exception, though it's preceded by two other parts in a series that are configured in more standard ways. The first film in the series, UNBREAKABLE, follows the standard dynamic of the superhero story, in which David Dunn fits the role of the defender and Mr. Glass, that of the challenger. SPLIT, the middle film, is patterned more on the dynamic of the monster-film, so that Kevin Crumb takes the role of challenger and his main victim is the defender. However, GLASS posits a situation in which a mysterious cabal takes the role of “challenger” to all three entities—hero, villain, and monster—and, despite the fight between Dunn and Crumb, the three of them have to defend their independence against the ruthless organization. However, it's very atypical for films in a series to shift the roles in this manner.

CHALLENGER VS. DEFENDER PT.2

Though the terms “challenger and defender” are patterned on the idea of physical conflict, they can be applied to any number of narrative forms, such as those involving a conflict of expectations.

In THE BASE LEVEL OF CONFLICT I observed that Bradbury’s short story “The Last Night of the World” as one that has nearly no conflict in the “X vs. Y” sense. A man and wife, the only characters in the story, become privy to the fact that the world is about to come to an end. Yet instead of their registering emotions of fear or frustration, the couple is totally okay with such a transcendent doom, implicitly because it’s better than the fate of nuclear annihilation. I noted in the essay that because the story focuses on the characters’ mental turnabout rather than on the phenomenon of the world’s death, so that in my current terminology, the world’s doom is the thing that challenges the select couple, and they are defenders not in the sense of rising to the challenge, albeit only in the sense of professing their total acceptance of their fate. Indeed, during my reading of Poe’s complete prose works, I became aware that in some of his vignettes—“Island of the Fay,” “The Oval Portrait”—the viewpoint characters have even less internal conflict. In both vignettes, the “defenders” are just windows into the author’s perspective, as he illustrates how something fair devolves into something foul.

The “conflict of expectations” feeds into a trope I discussed in CHANGING PARTNERS IN THE MONSTER-DEMIHERO DANCE, where I surveyed the use of the focal presence in a number of comic-book horror stories. I remarked that there’s a dominant tendency for the “monster”—what Frank Cioffi calls “the anomaly”—to be the star of the story. “The Gentle Old Man” overtly follows this tendency, while both “Grave Rehearsal” and “Bridal Night” do so in more covert fashion. At the beginning of each story, there’s an evil presence—respectively, Madame Satin and Count Von Roemer— both of whom take the role of “the challenger” and who seem more than able to overpower each of the viewpoint characters, respectively B.S. Fitts and Helena Ayres. But Ayres, though she is a defender, has greater power than Von Roemer and easily defeats him. B.S. Fitts does the same to Madame Satin, though Fitts only gains power after Satin has killed him.

Some defenders are the stars precisely because the evil in their nature calls up some sort of reciprocal evil, and this pattern is seen in both “The Speed Demon” and “Den of Horror.” The evils that doom both defenders fit the role of challengers, but they have a subordinate role, not least because they seem to evolve from the defender’s own nature, not unlike the doppelganger in Poe’s “William Wilson.” At the same time, irony doesn't always imply consubstantiality, for Prince Prospero, despite the way he perishes while defending himself from the Red Death, is not the personified plague's sole victim.

CHALLENGER AND DEFENDER PT. 1

Over a year ago I formulated two terms, “investment” and “fascination” in this essay. According to my system, these are the affects inspired by the two respective modes, the “endothelic” and the “exothelic,” which apply to a given literary work’s focal presence. Now I’ve formulated broad terms for each type of focal presence, to better illustrate the multifarious ways in which investment and fascination manifest.

Though Aristotle’s POETICS is the earliest extant work to speak of conflict as necessary to all narrative, not until the 19^th century did ArthurQuiller-Couch distinguish particular dominant tropes by which conflict was organized. To this day, people who don’t know Aristotle, much less Quiller-Couch, should recognize these tropes-- “man vs. man,” “man vs. nature,” and “man vs. society”—from their use in middle school lit classes. Quiller-Couch’s formulation seems to follow the basic structure handed down from archaic Greece, in which a “protagonist” was the star of the show and an “antagonist” challenged him. But in the twentieth century, sometimes the antagonist proved the more fascinating narrative presence, even if a protagonist-like figure might be around to give the reader some investment. H.P Lovecraft’s 1927 SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE boldly stated that in supernatural fiction the “phenomenon” was the star, while in 1982 Frank Cioffi stated that narrative conflict came about when some “anomaly” interfered with the status quo.

Without a doubt, the trope “sympathetic protagonist vs. antipathetic antagonist” is the dominant mode in the whole of literature. Thus most works are concerned with showing the reader how a character in which the reader has invested positive emotions defends himself against a given challenge. The opposite trope, however, puts an antagonist—be he real or perceived—in the driver’s seat,, so the reader’s dominant response is that of fascination with “the other” (little as I like invoking Sartre’s tired concept). Contrary to Cioffi's somewhat Marxist tendency to extol the anomaly—what I am calling “the challenger”—as a positive force that breaks down the status quo, many challenger-focused narratives end up validating the “status quo” viewpoint of the figure I call “the defender.” As I type these words, I’m half-watching a film that’s yet another take on Richard Condon’s famous short story, “The Most Dangerous Game.” There’s no question that Condon’s narrative focus is entirely upon the corrupt Count Zaroff, the man who decides to start hunting his fellow human beings. Yet this narrative strategy in no way compromises the POV of the defending protagonist, which maintains that Hunting Humans is Not a Good Thing. The same principle obtains with the various film-serials that focus less on the heroes than on the villains. The villains of THE PHANTOM CREEPS, THE WHISPERING SHADOW, and THE BLACK WIDOW are more interesting than the phlegmatic heroes, but the heroes still represent the right moral orientation.

As I discussed in INVESTMENT ANDFASCINATION PT. 3, sometimes the position of “challenger” can be an entire environment, often combining two Quiller-Couchisms: “man vs. nature” and “man vs. society.” In H.G. Wells’ TIME MACHINE, the nameless viewpoint character is essentially a rather passive defender of his time’s values. Those values are challenged and conquered when his time-machine reveals the horror at the heart of reality, summed up by the predacious relationship of the Morlocks to the Eloi. In the 1960 film-adaptation, Rod Taylor’s two-fisted scientist successfully defends his time’s ethics so strongly that he may be able to reverse the future world’s fall into entropy. Thus the original novel and its film-version evince the investment and fascination strategies respectively. However, the triumph or failure of the viewpoint-character is not the determining factor. WORLD WITHOUT END presages George Pal’s 1960 film by showing another corrupted future that can be saved. However, the titular world, the challenger, is the star even though its monstrous aspects are overthrown and tamed by the film’s dull defenders of the eternal verities.

Next up: curse-challenger and cursed defender.

ADDENDA: Just to line up all the categories, any work centered on a "challenger" would be exothelic, while any work centered on a defender would be endothelic.

THE MOST FAMOUS SUBCOMBATIVE ADVENTURE

In ROBINSON, CRUSADER OF MEDIOCRITY PT.2, I detailed some of the problems with which I’d grappled in terms of assigning ROBINSON CRUSOE its place within my literary system. I didn't have any problems in stating that CRUSOE qualifies as “the first major work of popular fiction.” The book’s mode of communication is markedly different from the mode of earlier elite-culture works that happened to become popular with the masses, ranging from Shakespeare’s PERICLES to Cervantes’ DON QUIXOTE. I also view CRUSOE, as well as its first sequel, as touchstones for the modern development of the adventure-mythos. However, this distinction must be qualified. Readers during the Enlightenment may have believed that chivalric romances belonged to an outmoded genre, but both “high” and “low” readers remained aware of how that type of fiction worked, how knightly heroes disported themselves. As I remarked earlier, Crusoe is anything but knightly in his bourgeois orientation, and though I do consider Defoe’s two Crusoe-novels to fall into the mythos of adventure, Crusoe himself is at best a demihero, and not a very impressive one. Even Friday, describing how he took the life of a wild bear just for kicks, comes closer to the model of the combative knight than does Robinson Crusoe.

Now, as my essay-title portends, Robert Louis Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND (published as a book in 1883 but serialized in a kids’ magazine two years previous) is also subcombative in terms of the dynamicity of its protagonist Jim Hawkins. However, while not all readers may think of ROBINSON CRUSOE as a pure adventure-novel, TREASURE ISLAND is practically a watchword for the mythos. To be sure, it’s preceded by many other classics in the same mythos, particularly the Big Three Perennials: Scott’s IVANHOE, Dumas’s THREE MUSKETEERS, and Cooper’s LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Yet though there had been numerous adventure-tales—now mostly unread—that featured juveniles as protagonists, ISLAND seems a breakthrough in terms of creating a true hero who simply happens to be a juvenile. By “true hero” I mean the type of character who fits the persona of “the hero,” more devoted to glory than immediate survival.


Hawkins is not utterly without economic motive. As much as his “good mentors” Livesy and Trelawney, and his ‘bad mentor” Long John Silver, Hawkins wants to profit by uncovering the lost treasure of pirate captain Flint. But there’s a sense in which the treasure gives Jim an excuse to get away from the mundane life of running an inn with his widowed mother. To be sure, he doesn’t expect to meet danger during the voyage to the isle of treasure (called “Skeleton Island”). Peril only looms its head when Hawkins learns that Silver has brought hardened pirates into the crew, who are willing to murder or maroon all of the ship's honest citizens, once the pirates have acquired Flint’s treasure. Nevertheless, twice in the story Hawkins boldly strikes off on his own, first to explore the island, and then to recapture the ship when it’s set adrift. Hawkins can’t fight or shoot, and he’s saved from being killed in his only battle-scene by losing his footing and falling down a hill. Nevertheless, Hawkins displays both the honor and courage of a hero. The sense of honor extends even to the duplicitous Silver, for Hawkins refuses to break his word to the pirate even to save Hawkins’ own life, and his courage is all the more remarkable because of the very real fears he experiences. Cinematic adaptations sometimes are accurate in conjuring with the terror-aspects of the boy’s early encounter with the fearsome Blind Pew, or Hawkins’ life-or-death struggle against the murderous Israel Hands. But the island itself is rarely shown as Stevenson shows it, as a place of potential malarial sickness, inhabited by “huge slimy monsters” (sea lions, unfamiliar to the young Englishman). And I’ve never seen a film that ended as the novel ends; with Jim Hawkins, years later, still haunted by nightmares of piratical iniquity, summed up by the memory of Long John’s parrot, mindlessly screaming “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

Like many of Stevenson’s works, TREASURE ISLAND was originally directed at young readers, for its original title was THE SEA COOK: A STORY FOR BOYS. I for one did not read the novel in my youth. My first memory was that of seeing a thirty-minute cartoon adaptation as an episode of THE FAMOUS ADVENTURES OF MISTER MAGOO, in which a version of Magoo, an actor rather than a blind old coot, essayed the role of Long John. The cartoon, like many live-action adaptations, played up Silver’s charm and wit, and downplayed the consequences of his intentions toward the honest treasure-seekers. I didn’t read the book until I was in my fifties or thereabout, when I sought to sort out the book’s relationship to the literary form of “the romance.” Indeed, Stevenson’s epigraph alludes to “the old romance, retold exactly in the ancient way,” which I take to be a reference to the chivalric romances, whose spirit Scott had revived in IVANHOE. To be sure, I doubt if any medieval romance ever had a villain as ambiguous as Long John Silver, who is the dark side of Hawkins as much as Hyde, five years later, would become the alter ego to Jekyll. Ironically, while Jekyll and Hyde perish together, Stevenson allows Silver to escape the fate he’s earned and to steal a sack of coins for his trouble, while Hawkins on the contrary is too haunted by his experience of “man’s inhumanity to man” to enjoy his share of the pirate treasure.

Despite the many horrific images in the novel, TREASURE ISLAND is entirely naturalistic, just like the Big Three Perennials. However, the book is indirectly responsible for spawning the cornerstone of the nineteenth century’s formulation of the superhero idiom. After reading ISLAND, H. Rider Haggard bet a friend that he Haggard could write a novel as good as Stevenson’s work. While there had been pirate adventures before ISLAND, KING SOLOMON’S MINES instituted the subgenre known as the “lost race novel.” Perhaps more importantly, MINES introduced one of the nineteenth century’s first serial characters whose adventures were both (1) predominantly metaphenomal in nature, and (2) predominantly based around the agon of combat. Allen Quatermain, star of MINES and the eight books that followed, does end up chasing a legendary treasure as does Hawkins. But Quatermain is a seasoned campaigner rather than a beardless boy, and though Haggard killed off his character in the second book, the series was popular enough for the author to bring Quatermain back in six “prequels.” To my knowledge Stevenson never wrote anything that belongs to the superhero idiom, but TREASURE ISLAND remains an important link in the chain of events that led to that idiom, ranging from Nick Carter to Tarzan and John Carter and on through the costumed offspring of four-color comics.

MYTHCOMICS: "MAD MOES" (THE SPIRIT, 1947)

For a city boy, Will Eisner occasionally displayed a flair for emulating the feel of country folklore. MAD MOES isn’t quite as good as his two-years-later hillbilly-yarn THE CURSE, in that the former jams a few too many events into its short space. But Eisner does succeed, more than in other tales using personification of non-human things or entities, in transforming a force of nature into something akin to a deity.

Eisner begins in a mock-Biblical mode, telling the reader that “In the beginning there was the desert, the dust, Mad Moes the river, and Lizard.” The character named Lizard is one of Eisner’s many eccentric old coots, and his nickname presumably stems from his habit of lazily sitting in the sun outside his shack, erected on a small island amidst the river. But Lizard is only important as an ally to Mad Moes, “a no good, shiftless, ornery river.” “Shiftless” in this case means being useless to most forms of life, for a caption relates that for vague reasons the river can’t be used for human trading and even fish can’t live in it. The “ornery” part comes about every spring, when snow melting in the mountains causes the river to flood the surrounding habitations of man—all except Lizard’s shack, which always gets miraculously spared.

The state authorities finally get fed up with Moes’s madness, and plan to dam the river. Surveyors ask Lizard for assistance, but the old fellow runs them off, claiming that he and Mad Moes are bosom friends. Much as the authorities would like to evict Lizard, they live in some peculiar state where eminent domain is trumped by squatters’ rights. Nevertheless, the old man can’t keep the authorities from setting up a boom town to house the personnel building the dam. But to make sure Lizard stays out of the way, the forces of law and order designate the land around Lizard’s island to be a national park, so that if he leaves, he gets arrested for trespassing. The story moves so fast that no one asks where Lizard gets his food (leftover victory garden?), and the scene shifts to the technical hero of the tale.

The Spirit happens to be in a neighboring city, breaking up an illegal gambling operation (supposedly aimed at “minors”) and sending its operators packing. But experienced criminals know how to use the law to their own ends. The gambler Stud Sharpe and his moll Queeny find their way to the boom town, which spells easy fleecings, and then stumble across Lizard’s island-shack. When they find out that the old guy’s shack is technically outside the bounds of the law, the gamblers set up a very humble version of a poker palace on his island. By luring in the local dam-workers, the gamblers not only line their pockets, they please Lizard, who’s willing to do anything that impedes the dam’s construction.

The unlikely ploy works, and the dam-project suffers from absenteeism (sort of like the dam-workers, who are talked about but not seen). Because the authorities are stymied by their own laws, they resort to calling in that famed “outlaw,” the Spirit. While the vigilante lays his plans for acing out the gamblers, the occupants of the shack have a falling out. Lizard tries to get romantic with Queeny, and to entice her, he reveals that he has a cache of gold nuggets, a bounty perpetually washed up on his island by the shiftless river. Up to this point the gamblers have apparently been planning to cut out as soon as they made a pile, but the promise of gold changes their plans. Sharpe easily swindles Lizard out of the rights to his land (a good trick, since Lizard doesn’t actually own the land) and kicks the old man out. Providentially, the Spriit shows up, and with a lit stick of dynamite forces Sharpe to play cards for everything the gamblers made off their victims.

While the card-game proceeds, Lizard seeks to invoke the river-god for vengeance. Though Eisner tells us that the dam-work has stalled, apparently it got far enough to confine part of Mad Moes’s bulk behind a sluice gate— and because it’s been raining hard, Moes once more has enough water to unleash a killing fury. Lizard unlocks the sluice gate, hoping that his friend the river will annihilate his former allies in the shack.

Back at the shack, the Spirit shows that a clean gambler can always beat a dirty one, recovering all the lost winnings. This is apparently not a good enough reason to extinguish his stick of dynamite, which has to remain lit so that Lizard can use it. Best not to ask how Lizard, swept along by the river-waters, manages to reach the island before the worst of the deluge, but the old coot grabs the dynamite, trying to use it against Sharpe and Queeny. Instead, the explosion somehow blocks off the deluge, so that no one perishes. Presumably once the Spirit delivers the workers’ lost wages, they hunker down and get the job done, for the last panel shows “the great renegade river” at last penned up behind a mammoth concrete dam, and the forces of law and order triumphant. Since the authorrties no longer need to isolate Lizard’s shack, the park-order is rescinded, and what was once Mad Moes’s river-bed is paved over for a superhighway. Yet in a visual sense at least, Lizard continues to attach himself to Mad Moes like a votary of a deserted temple, for now his shack has become a gas station, and the desert rat is still there, sunning himself.

Online research shows multiple origins for the name from which the river takes its monicker. “Old Man Mose” can be viewed as a generic term for any old guy, as a figure in American folklore, as a character in a LI’L ABNER story and as the subject of a Louis Armstrong song, possibly based on the Al Capp strip. Eisner’s use of the name plays to his love of puns, but the process is the reverse of what he would later do in THE CURSE. There, the famed bay known as the Zuiderzee is transformed into the name of the story’s female character, Cider Sue. Here, Eisner tinkers with the name of a folklore-figure and makes him into a river, a river somehow coeval with a real old man. Though MAD MOES is haphazard in terms of verisimilitude, this doesn’t affect Eisner’s ability to use a force of nature to illustrate the mythic war between law and lawlessness, a war that ends by dethroning a rather ornery minor god.

THE READING RHEUM: RE-ENTER FU MANCHU (1957)

Once again many years pass between books in the Fu Manchu series—almost ten years between 1948’s SHADOW OF FU MANCHU and this one, in 1957. And whatever Sax Rohmer was doing during that time-period, he didn’t devote a lot of his time to the plot of the next-to-last Fu-novel. RE-ENTER wins the honor of being the least interesting book in the series, and the one with the most internal problems.

This time the viewpoint-character is American Brian Merrick, who in general is no better or worse than most of Rohmer’s earnest young men. Because he’s the son of a U.S. Senator who has the ear of the American President, the Si-Fan evolves a plan that sends Merrick to Cairo, supposedly to rendezvous with Nayland Smith—though, for good measure, the FBI also has an interest in helping Merrick on his path to adventure. Merrick’s not that much of a “junior adventurer,” but he does have a romantic allure for two sexy women, with none of Shan Greville’s protests about not enjoying it. One lady is Lola Erskine, an American who’s eventually revealed to be an agent of the FBI, while the other, Zoe Montero, is a vaguely Middle Eastern girl in the service of the Si-Fan. It won’t be any great surprise as to which girl wins Merrick’s heart, but then, neither one is all that compelling. Zoe even comes close to betraying Fu Manchu’s confidence, but, as if in compensation for her not getting the guy, the doctor allows her to perform a final service to win her freedom from the Si-Fan.

Fu’s mercy toward Zoe isn’t precisely out of character, but it’s one of a handful of irregularities that make one wonder how well Rohmer thought things through. There’s no reference to Fu getting either support or trouble from the Council of Seven, and though Fah Lo Suee’s been missing since ISLAND, her long absence persuades me that Rohmer simply didn’t know what to do with her once he’d both resurrected and brainwashed her. Though the doctor was always shown to possess a wry sense of humor, RE-ENTER breaks character by showing him actually laughing. True, it’s sardonic laughter, when one of Fu’s subordinates makes a comment on their Soviet allies, but the reaction still seems poorly thought out. At least Fu’s alliance with the Soviets is merely a prelude to his betraying them, which means that the character’s contempt for Socialism is undimmed. However, I never got a sense of what benefit Fu received from the temporary alliance-- and indeed, said alliance almost costs him his life.

Granted, even the devil-doctor is human and capable of error. But to keep his ongoing relationship with the Soviets, he allows one particular Russian agent to take a sample of Fu’s priceless elixir vitae for analysis. In his conversation with Agent Gorodin, Fu expressly says that he did so knowing that the Soviets could not analyze the elixir, and that he Fu held that conviction when he allowed Gorodin to take the sample. But it’s not clear why Fu allowed Gorodin to gain total access to the doctor’s only extant supply of the rejuvenating chemical, which results in Gorodin trying to substitute a deadly poison. Fu doesn’t fall for this, of course, but why does he fall for the first gambit at all? As a result, the master villain almost perishes of old age until he can receive a supplemental dose of youth-potion from another source. It’s one thing for Fu Manchu to make mistakes because, on some level, he might like to have willing servants who obey him of their own volition. But it’s clear that he has no special regard for Gorodin, so why would he trust the agent?

Fu’s ultimate plot is actually designed to nullify the Communist control of the East and to substitute the rule of the Si-Fan. By either suborning or stealing the research of a German scientist with the interesting name of “Hessian,” Fu plans to impersonate Hessian and to present the American President with a revolutionary anti-nuclear defense, “the sound zone.” But to gain access to the President, Fu involves the son of Senator Merrick, and also uses Brian Merrick as a means of transporting Nayland Smith from Cairo to America. However, the Smith accompanying Merrick is a surgically altered double for Smith, who remains Fu’s prisoner while the double goes to the U.S. with Merrick. Inevitably, Smith not only gets free, he manages to fix things so that Fu’s agents mistakenly slay the double. Smith then plays his own double and manages to deceive Fu Manchu in a one-on-one interview. I’m not sure Rohmer remembered that he’d often shown both Fu and his daughter as being able to glean prominent thoughts from the brains of their opponents on occasion, which makes the success of such an interview improbable. On the other hand, in one novel Fah Lo Sues tells Shan Greville that she can only read minds when the subject is relaxed, so maybe Rohmer’s earlier works can be used to justify at least one later novel’s problem.

Perhaps it’s needless to state that no one gets the use of the revolutionary anti-nuclear defense, nor does Fu achieve any of his political ends. Possibly his animus toward Communism proves a vulnerability, since his foes know he won’t give it to the Commies. Despite some false notes for the evil doctor, his scenes are still the high points of this very weak concoction.