by Sax Rohmer
He knelt beside her, his arm around her shoulders as she took the glass. Lola smiled, that fascinating, mocking smile.
“If I drank all this, Brian, I’d faint a second time.”
She took a sip of the brandy, and he drew her to him. “My lips are sticky from that awful tape,” she protested.
Brian held her very close, but kissed her gently. “I nearly went crazy when I heard you were missing.”
Lola took another sip and then set the glass down. “So you’ve found out about me.” She spoke softly. “You know what a little liar I am!”
“I know you have more grit in your little finger than I have in all my hulking carcass!”
“You mean you forgive me for what I had to do?”
“Forgive you!”
She raised her hand to check him. “Brian dear, go back now, and let me lie here for five minutes. I’ll be perfectly all right when I’ve rested—and cleaned the goo off my face. Then I’ll join you.”
“Leave you here alone! And Fu Manchu—”
“Fu Manchu is too far away to harm me.”
“But we heard his voice!”
“I know you did. He intended you to hear it. But he isn’t there. Go up and see for yourself. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”
And when Brian, torn between his desire to stay with Lola and a burning curiosity, returned to the penthouse, he found the proper entrance door open. Harkness was bending over the cabinet that looked like a radio set, the back of which had been removed. Nayland Smith was pacing the room and pulling at his ear.
“How is she?” he asked.
“Fine. She’s coming up after a little rest. But where’s Dr. Fu Manchu?”
Sir Denis pointed to an open drawer of the bureau. “There—all we have of him! A tape recorder playing back our conversations in Cairo. If you and I had listened a while longer, we should have heard my voice as well. Brought over for the benefit of my successor. The cunning devil!”
Brian stared about the room incredulously, still half expecting to see the dark spectacles of Dr. Hessian—the only picture he had of the dreaded Fu Manchu—peering out from some shadowy corner.
“But the door! What was the danger of opening the door?”
“The danger’s on the table there,” Harkness called out “Three ordinary bell-pushers were under the carpet where anybody coming in couldn’t miss stepping on one of them.”
“Wired to the receiver you shot to pieces,” Sir Denis added grimly. “If Lola hadn’t lost her head—although God knows I don’t blame her—we might have disconnected them, and so had the secret of the Sound Zone in our hands!”
“Then the other thing”—Brian nodded toward the cabinet—“was connected all the time?”
“It was. One step, and Lola, as well as everyone else and everything breakable in the penthouse, would have gone west. Which reminds me of something you may be able to tell me… the French windows. You saw the demonstration. Why weren’t the windows blown out?”
Brian thought hard. He tried to picture this room as he had seen it then, and a memory came.
“I think I can tell you. I remember now that just before Dr. Hessian began to talk, the Japanese lowered what looked like metal shutters over the windows, and then drew those drapes over them.”
“The shutters are still there,” Sir Denis told him. “Couldn’t make out if they were a hotel fixture. Now I know they should be examined. Evidently made of some material nonconductive of the fatal sound.”
Harkness stood up from his examination of the cabinet and lighted a cigarette.
“Fu Manchu planned to leave no evidence, Mr. Merrick,” he remarked. “We found a small, but I guess effective, time bomb inside this thing. Dakin worked with a bomb-disposal squad in England during the war. He’s an expert. He’s out in the kitchen fixing it.”
“You see, Merrick?” Nayland Smith snapped. “I’m naturally proud of Scotland Yard, but your FBI isn’t without merit. What d’you make of that set, Harkness?”
“This is by no means an ordinary radio set, Sir Denis. It’s some kind of transmitter. Though what it transmits and where it gets it from are mysteries. We haven’t tinkered with it. That’s a laboratory job. But Dakin thinks it can convert all sorts of sounds into that one high inaudible note on which we had a report from Number One. Evidently this note doesn’t become dangerous until it has passed through the special receiver.”
“It’s the receiver that converts the sound,” a clear voice explained.
All three turned in a flash. Lola stood there smiling at them. Sir Denis was first with a chair. Lola thanked him and sat down.
“If you feel up to it, Miss Erskine,” he said quietly, “perhaps you would explain in more detail.”
“I feel up to anything. Particularly, I feet like an idiot for getting hysterical and then passing out. You see, Sir Denis, he”—she seemed to avoid naming Dr. Fu Manchu, as Nayland Smith had known others to do—“was good enough to give me all particulars before leaving me to be shattered. The transmitter, he informed me, is really a sort of selector, or filter. It picks up only certain high notes, vocal or instrumental. On an ordinary receiving set this would come through as atmospheric interferences. It was the thing that Brian blew up that converted the sound to what he called ‘the superaural key,’ which shatters everything within range.” She glanced up as Dakin returned from the kitchen.
“It’s harmless now, sir,” he reported to Nayland Smith. “We’ve saved some evidence.”
Another member of Harkness’ party appeared in the doorway.
“What now?” Harkness demanded.
“Doc Alex reports that he’s suffering from thundering concussion—but there isn’t a single bruise on his head!”
“Who’s this?” Brian asked.
“Sergeant Ruppert.”
“Sergeant Ruppert! Where did you find him?”
“In the apartment of our next-door neighbors,” Nayland Smith told him dryly, “while you were taking care of Miss Erskine.” He turned to the man at the door. “Does the doctor think he will recover?”
“He does, sir—and hopes there’ll be no complications.”
“They found a dead man in there, too. Mr. Merrick,” Harkness broke in. “You mightn’t recognize him, the way he looks now. But up till today we all mistook him for Sir Denis.”
“I know. But what about the man in the blue turban?”
“Prince Ranji Bhutani?” Harkness laughed. “He and his servant have vanished, of course. I don’t imagine the ‘prince’ was wearing his blue turban! They must have got away soon after strangling your double, Sir Denis. We had that pair under observation already and there’s a fifty-fifty chance we can pick them up.”
“If Sergeant Ruppert was found there, they evidently got him, too.”
Ray Harkness shook his head. “Four guests on your floor, Mr. Merrick, checked out earlier today. We don’t know if any of them belonged to the gang. Only one, Mrs. Nadia Narovska, has disappeared like the ‘prince’ and left her luggage behind. Said to be a very good-looker.”
“But she may be coming back,” Brian pointed out. “The manager reports she came in only a few minutes before the elevator was stopped and the Sergeant went on duty at the stair door. How did she get out?”
“But it would be impossible for her to have overpowered a big fellow like that!”
“If she belonged to Dr. Fu Manchu,” Nayland Smith said bitterly, “and she sounds like one of his women, nothing is impossible! I haven’t settled down yet to the fact that that cunning fiend has escaped me again. In my crazy overconfidence I missed my chance. It was my duty to the world when I stood before him to shoot him dead.” He banged his fist into the palm of his left hand. “They all slipped away in whatever time they had between the attack on Ruppert and the time Merrick and I came upstairs. Once they were on street level, New York was open to them. Our hush-hush policy has defeated its own ends. Dr. Fu Manchu can assume many personalities and he probably had a ca
r waiting.”
“It’s not so black as you paint it,” Harkness insisted. “We may have lost the secret of this wonderful air cover, but if the price Uncle Sam had to pay for it was putting our defenses in the hands of Dr. Fu Manchu, we gain more than we lose.”
Nayland Smith forced a smile. “You may be right. Dr. Fu Manchu has still to get out of the country… Oh, Merrick, Miss Erskine has passed through a frightful ordeal. I suggest you take her along for a good dinner. Dine downstairs. I’ll page you when your father arrives. We shall all have many things to talk about. And I can see you have a lot of things to say to Lola.”
APPRECIATING DR. FU-MANCHU
BY LESLIE S. KLINGER
The “yellow peril”—that stereotypical threat of Asian conquest—seized the public imagination in the late nineteenth century, in political diatribes and in fiction. While several authors exploited this fear, the work of Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, better known as Sax Rohmer, stood out.
Dr. Fu-Manchu was born in Rohmer’s short story “The Zayat Kiss,” which first appeared in a British magazine in 1912. Nine more stories quickly appeared and, in 1913, the tales were collected as The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu in America). The Doctor appeared in two more series before the end of the Great War, collected as The Devil Doctor (The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu) and The Si-Fan Mysteries (The Hand of Fu-Manchu).
After a fourteen-year absence, the Doctor reappeared in 1931, in The Daughter of Fu-Manchu. There were nine more novels, continuing until Rohmer’s death in 1959, when Emperor Fu-Manchu was published. Four stories, which had previously appeared only in magazines, were published in 1973 as The Wrath of Fu-Manchu.
The Fu-Manchu stories also have been the basis of numerous motion pictures, most famously the 1932 MGM film The Mask of Fu Manchu, featuring Boris Karloff as the Doctor.
In the early stories, Fu-Manchu and his cohorts are the “yellow menace,” whose aim is to establish domination of the Asian races. In the 1930s Fu-Manchu foments political dissension among the working classes. By the 1940s, as the wars in Europe and Asia threaten terrible destruction, Fu-Manchu works to depose other world leaders and defeat the Communists in Russia and China.
Rohmer undoubtedly read the works of Conan Doyle, and there is a strong resemblance between Nayland Smith and Holmes. There are also marked parallels between the four doctors, Petrie and Watson as the narrator-comrades, and Dr. Fu-Manchu and Professor Moriarty as the arch-villains.
The emphasis is on fast-paced action set in exotic locations, evocatively described in luxuriant detail, with countless thrills occurring to the unrelenting ticking of a tightly wound clock. Strong romantic elements and sensually described, sexually attractive women appear throughout the tales, but ultimately it is the fantastic nature of the adventures that appeal.
This is the continuing appeal of Dr. Fu-Manchu, for despite his occasional tactic of alliance with the West, he unrelentingly pursued his own agenda of world domination. In the long run, Rohmer’s depiction of Fu-Manchu rose above the fears and prejudices that may have created him to become a picture of a timeless and implacable creature of menace.
* * *
A complete version of this essay can be found in The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, also available from Titan Books.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sax Rohmer was born Arthur Henry Ward in 1883, in Birmingham, England, adding “Sarsfield” to his name in 1901. He was four years old when Sherlock Holmes appeared in print, five when the Jack the Ripper murders began, and sixteen when H.G. Wells’ Martians invaded.
Initially pursuing a career as a civil servant, he turned to writing as a journalist, poet, comedy sketch writer, and songwriter in British music halls. At age 20 he submitted the short story “The Mysterious Mummy” to Pearson’s magazine and “The Leopard-Couch” to Chamber’s Journal. Both were published under the byline “A. Sarsfield Ward.”
Ward’s Bohemian associates Cumper, Bailey, and Dodgson gave him the nickname “Digger,” which he used as his byline on several serialized stories. Then, in 1908, the song “Bang Went the Chance of a Lifetime” appeared under the byline “Sax Rohmer.” Becoming immersed in theosophy, alchemy, and mysticism, Ward decided the name was appropriate to his writing, so when “The Zayat Kiss” first appeared in The Story-Teller magazine in October, 1912, it was credited to Sax Rohmer.
That was the first story featuring Fu-Manchu, and the first portion of the novel The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu. Novels such as The Yellow Claw, Tales of Secret Egypt, Dope, The Dream Detective, The Green Eyes of Bast, and Tales of Chinatown made Rohmer one of the most successful novelists of the 1920s and 1930s.
There are fourteen Fu-Manchu novels, and the character has been featured in radio, television, comic strips, and comic books. He first appeared in film in 1923, and has been portrayed by such actors as Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, John Carradine, Peter Sellers, and Nicolas Cage.
Rohmer died in 1959, a victim of an outbreak of the type A influenza known as the Asian flu.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
THE COMPLETE FU-MANCHU SERIES
Sax Rohmer
Available now:
THE MYSTERY OF DR. FU-MANCHU
THE RETURN OF DR. FU-MANCHU
THE HAND OF FU-MANCHU
THE DAUGHTER OF FU-MANCHU
THE MASK OF FU-MANCHU
THE BRIDE OF FU-MANCHU
THE TRAIL OF FU-MANCHU
PRESIDENT FU-MANCHU
THE DRUMS OF FU-MANCHU
THE ISLAND OF FU-MANCHU
THE SHADOW OF FU-MANCHU
Coming soon:
EMPEROR FU-MANCHU
THE WRATH OF FU-MANCHU AND OTHER STORIES
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THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s timeless creation returns in a series of handsomely designed detective stories. The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes encapsulate the most varied and thrilling cases of the world’s greatest detective.
THE ECTOPLASMIC MAN
by Daniel Stashower
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
by Manly Wade Wellman & Wade Wellman
THE SCROLL OF THE DEAD
by David Stuart Davies
THE STALWART COMPANIONS
by H. Paul Jeffers
THE VEILED DETECTIVE
by David Stuart Davies
THE MAN FROM HELL
by Barrie Roberts
SÉANCE FOR A VAMPIRE
by Fred Saberhagen
THE SEVENTH BULLET
by Daniel D. Victor
THE WHITECHAPEL HORRORS
by Edward B. Hanna
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HOLMES
by Loren D. Estleman
THE ANGEL OF THE OPERA
by Sam Siciliano
THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA
by Richard L. Boyer
THE PEERLESS PEER
by Philip José Farmer
THE STAR OF INDIA
by Carole Buggé
THE WEB WEAVER
by Sam Siciliano
THE TITANIC TRAGEDY
by William Seil
SHERLOCK HOLMES VS. DRACULA
by Loren D. Estleman
THE GRIMSWELL CURSE
by Sam Siciliano
THE DEVIL’S PROMISE
by David Stuart Davies
THE ALBINO’S TREASURE
by Stuart Douglas
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MURDER AT SORROW’S CROWN
by Steven Savile & Robert Greenberger
THE WHITE WORM
by Sam Siciliano
THE RIPPER LEGACY
by David Stuart Davies
THE COUNTERFEIT DETECTIVE
by Stuart Douglas
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THE HARRY HOUDINI MYSTERIES
Daniel Stashower
THE DIME MUSEUM MURDERS
THE FLOATING LADY MURDER
THE HOUDINI SPECTER
In turn-of-the-century New York, the Great Houdini’s confidence in his own abilities is matched only by the indifference of the paying public. Now the young performer has the opportunity to make a name for himself by attempting the most amazing feats of his fledgling career—solving what seem to be impenetrable crimes. With the reluctant help of his brother Dash, Houdini must unravel murders, debunk frauds and escape from danger that is no illusion…
A thrilling series from the author of The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Ectoplasmic Man.
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