The Yellowest of Perils

Fu Manchu

Sax Rohmer
(Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward)

Although Sax Rohmer (1883-1959) wrote many different novels and short stories, from eerie mysteries to epic adventures to philosophical musings, he will forever be remembered as the creator of the oriental arch-villain Dr Fu Manchu, a criminal genius with immense wealth and occult powers whose goal was world domination and the subjugation of all other races. It can be argued (and has been by people who have never read any of the fourteen books) that Fu Manchu is a deliberate racist creation, a focus for white angst, and a manifestation of the "yellow peril" of the times, a cheap attempt to capitalize upon fear and hatred. Rohmer did not see his creation in quite that same jaundiced light; when asked about the person of Fu Manchu, he always claimed his character was based on a real individual, a crime lord he named "Mr King," whom he would at times see while working as a journalist in the Limehouse district, which was London's Chinatown at the time:

"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, ... one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present ... Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."

Whether or not Fu Manchu was based on reality (Mr King never went to jail and some now doubt he was ever more than a marketing ploy for Rohmer) he was much more popular than the other sinister orientals that skulked and menaced their way through pulp magazines, for he remains with us today, and they are but mounds of crumbling paper pulp. Unlike them, the Devil Doctor, as he was sometimes called, began his literary life between hard covers (The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu [The Insidious Dr Fu-Manchu in America] in 1913), and when he did appear in a short story it was in a slick magazine like Colliers or Liberty, not one of the dime pulps. While that gave him a better literary pedigree, he has outlasted the others because he really is a towering literary creation, much like Professor Moriarty or Dracula.

From the very beginning, there were critics of the stories, those who believed that Rohmer was vilifying all orientals, that he was portraying Limehouse as a vice-ridden cesspool when its crime rate was lower than other areas of London because the Chinese were in general a very law-abiding race. In actuality, crime in Limehouse was much higher than other parts of London for certain kinds of crime, such as forced prostitution and extortion. However, no matter how much someone groused, the rumblings were rather small because it was just a character in a book, and in a literary setting it is much easier to transform a caricature into a living, breathing person, especially for a writer as good as Rohmer.

The first real opposition to the image of Fu Manchu came when he moved to Hollywood. When MGM's The Mask of Fu Manchu, with Boris Karloff, hit screens in 1932, it prompted an official protest from the Chinese embassy. In 1940, Republic Studios released one of its best serials, The Drums of Fu Manchu, which brought a smack-down from the United States government, China being one of our allies at the time. Hallam Productions/Constantin Films made some great films in the 1960s with Christopher Lee, but by then the counter current was against them, and everyone gave up. Now, it's impossible to screen an old film without someone getting their knickers in a twist, and as far as making a new film...not going to happen, not even in satire. Fu Manchu thwarted the efforts of the world's best policemen and criminologists for a century, but was done in by busybodies with picket signs.

On the other hand, a character who cast such a long shadow as Fu Manchu, who was as popular with readers for so long (Rohmer's last novel was in 1959), is not about to fade away because some people find him an uncomfortable image. In 1973, a collection of Fu Manchu short stories was published as The Wrath of Fu Manchu. Cay Van Ash, Rohmer's assistant and biographer, went on to write two authorized books in the series, Ten Years Beyond Baker Street (1984) and The Fires of Fu Manchu (1987). More recently, William Patrick Maynard has taken up Rohmer's pen to write three authorized novels, The Terror of Fu Manchu (2009), The Destiny of Fu Manchu (2012), and The Triumph of Fu Manchu (scheduled). In addition, Fu Manchu has made all sorts of unauthorized appearances in novels or has been alluded to, from Sherlock Holmes stories to a Man From U.N.C.L.E novel, to Dracula novels. So, despite the best efforts of the well-intentioned, it does not seem we will be rid of Dr Fu Manchu anytime soon...and that's a good thing.

Cover by Christine Clavel

A parting word about Fu Manchu, his impact upon society, and the portrait by the talented Christine Clavel which appears on William Patrick Maynard's second book from Black Coat Press. You may be asking yourself, "Hey, where's the mustache?" Despite how Fu Manchu has been portrayed on book covers and in films, the Devil Doctor is actually a clean-shaven gent. Bear in mind, Fu Manchu was a master of disguise (many encountered him without even knowing it) and you can't be a master of disguise with an immovable mustache on your lip or a beard. So, what about all the gangstas proudly sporting their spurious Fu-Manchu Mustaches? They look silly, and even sillier if they include a "soul patch" (what an unfortunate name), but I doubt it's likely to change anytime soon, not with law enforcement using it in descriptions so often and it being a style recognized officially by the World Beard & Moustache Association (yes, it's real). Personally, I'm going to start calling it the "Devil-stache."

About Ralph E Vaughan: I have written several pastiches dealing with the world of Sherlock Holmes, and am credited with writing the first Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu Mythos crossover in The Adventure of the Ancient Gods. I am the author of Shadows Against the Empire, an interplanetary steampunk adventure novel set in 1882, and I enjoy reading and writing pulp-style adventures. I am also the creator of the Paws & Claws series of young adult novels, which chronicles the exploits of the Three Dog Detective Agency. For further info about me, visit my Face book page and click "like." And, yes, I have a mustache (but not a Fu Manchu [AKA Devil-stache]), and have often been described, much to my chagrin, as a "friendly walrus."

The Other Solar System

I don't know about you, but I'm rather disappointed with the way our Solar System turned out. It's totally changed from the way it was when I was a lad. Not only have the planets gotten extreme makeovers, but we don't even have nine planets anymore, Pluto having been given the boot by some narrow-minded astro-boffins; any day now, I expect poor little Mercury to get a pink slip: "Sorry, Mercury, don't get all hot under the collar, but you're just too small to play with us...go whine to Pluto and all the other asteroids."

As recently as the 1970s (I know, some of you were not even born then, but that's not my fault) our Solar System was a place of mystery and adventure, the planets not very different than they were to the pulp writers of the previous generations, who set stories in the mines of Mercury, the jungles of Venus and the canals of Mars. Modern science has ripped away the mystery of those other worlds, not only taking away the hopes for grand adventures, but making the planets, to me at least, much less interesting. You can still read the old stories by Ray Cummings and Leigh Brackett, Arthur C Clarke and Otis Adelbert Kline, or Jack Williamson and H.P. Lovecraft, but the adventure is always tempered with a measure of wistful sadness, for now they are not science fiction stories of possible (if not probable) futures, but fables or fairy tales, and while we can still derive pleasure from them, it is not an enjoyment seasoned with anticipation. I like the classic view of the planets, so when I sat down to write Shadows Against the Empire, I set the action not in the Solar System as it is, but in the Solar System as it should have been, an alternate universe where old school astronomy still ruled.

The big thing about classic Mercury is that it is (or should be) tidally locked, as is our Moon, one side ever facing the sun. The planet being in such a situation creates stable climates on both sides of the planet, one metal-melting hot, the other cold as absolute zero, both of which can be endured and exploited; more than that, however, tidal-locked Mercury has a kind of temperate band between the two extremes, a "twilight zone" where colonies can be built. Isaac Asimov (writing as Paul French) sent his protagonists onto the hot half of Mercury in Lucky Starr & the Big Sun of Mercury, as did Alan E. Nourse with "Brightside Crossing." Writer Leigh Brackett located her cities in the Twilight Zone, and had two of her main protagonists, Eric John Stark and Jaffa Storm, born there. Two writers who took on non-human inhabitants of Mercury were Arthur C. Clarke, who described a Dark Side creature in Islands in the Sky, and Hal Clement, who wrote about the Bright Side's silicon occupants in Iceworld. During the 19th Century, astronomers observed a planet even closer to the sun than Mercury and called it Vulcan, but no one ever wrote about it...oh, the planet with the pointy-eared chaps? Sorry, not the same one.

Venus was always fun to speculate about, if only because our wild guesses about what lay beneath its thick cloud cover were just as valid as those of the astro-boffins with their big telescopes. Swamps, lizard men, jungles, tempestuous oceans, trackless deserts and soaring mountains, torrential rains that made Seattle look parched, and ancient cities connected by rivers dwarfing the Nile and Amazon. Anything went because no one could penetrate those clouds. And then came that terrible day when all us Venus theorizing space cadets found ourselves in the same position as Professor Harold Hill:

Marcellus Washburn: I heard you was in steam automobiles.
Professor Harold Hill: I was... till someone actually 'invented' one!

Not only did they use radar to tell us what the planet looked like under the thick canopy of roiling clouds but those darned Soviets actually landed a probe on Venus -- it melted. So much for jungles, swamps, oceans and even the poor old lizard-men. It was no tropic paradise as Ray Bradbury and H.P. Lovecraft had promised in two of their stories. Nor could we sail our schooners around the seas of Venus to encounter pirates and sea monsters as Edgar Rice Burroughs had assured us in the adventures of wrong-way astronaut Carson Napier in the Amtor (as the natives called Venus) Series, and as ERB wannabe Otis Adelbert Kline wrote in Prince of Peril and Port of Peril. No longer could China colonize Venus for the purpose of cultivating rice, as it did in Jack Williamson's Seetee Ship. Even the dark and dangerous cities visited by Northwest Smith, where segir (Venusian whisky) is cheap and life cheaper, went up in a poof of sulfurous smoke. In an instant, Venus went from Planet Mystery to Planet Hell. Thanks, Russia.

Of all the planets to transition from the "old" Solar System to the "new," Mars was perhaps the hardest hit, if only because everyone expected so much out of it. It wasn't just that we thought it might be the abode of life, we knew it. Even though we had never seen cities there, had never actually seen the blue waters of the canals, and had never received any signals from the Martians, we knew they were waiting for us...or coming to get us, as the case may be. In the Nineteenth Century a cash prize was offered to anyone who could prove life existed on another planet...except Mars. Burroughs populated it with all manner of creatures and ancient races, making it even more interesting than Earth. So did Ray Bradbury, C.L. Moore and Robert Heinlein; theologian and sometimes SF writer C.S. Lewis made Mars the abode of angelic beings in Out of the Silent Planet. As more information was gathered about Mars, the canals, the cities, the thin but breathable atmosphere...all went the way of dreams at the dawning. Some writers struggled on, but most sighed, grabbed the latest copies of Scientific American and Astronomy, and plotted new stories that did not depend upon Martians. A final farewell, a sort of eulogy, was published by F&SF in its November 1963 issue, A Rose for Ecclesiastes by Roger Zelazny.

I don't claim that good adventure stories cannot be written in the Solar System as it now exists, for I have read many over the years, but I do claim that the "new" astronomy put an end to the planetary adventure tale as it existed for more two centuries. Now, anyone who wants to set stories on the inhabited planets of our Solar System must either use human colonists, life-forms with which we can little contact, or establish an alternate universe where things went differently, as many steampunk writers (and me) have done. Otherwise, writers looking for adventures that involve swashbuckling or derring-do must either travel to Earth's past or seek new worlds out amongst the stars.

Of course, that does not mean our neighboring planet is entirely bereft of surprises...

So were Chinese Crested dogs.

Please, no carping about this one

Like this surprises anyone!

Obviously, he took the better offer.

Doc Savage: Arch-Enemy of Evil

The time: the middle part of the last century.

The place: A swap meet in a small town hard upon the western sea.

The mission: To boldly discover brave new worlds.

A much younger version of me searched for books that day so long ago. Since paperbacks cost a whopping 35-45 cents each, it made sense to haunt swap meets, used book stores and charity shops. Though I was not as far from the cradle then as I am now (which, unfortunately, now puts me closer to the gave), my reading habits were not any less catholic. I was too young to have been poisoned by a government education system that stigmatizes great writers by labeling their works "literature" or "classic," surely the kiss of death; by the same token, I was too young to scorn "trashy" or "hack" novels...though I did have the good sense not to leave I Walk the Bloody Boulevard or Murder Most Foul where my mother would stumble across them. In my search I encountered a novel featuring a painting so photorealistic I did not at first realize it was a painting, but it was the subject of the painting -- the most extraordinary man I had ever seen -- that held my attention, mesmerized me even as I handed over a Mercury dime. The book was The Phantom City, and the man was Clark Savage Jr, otherwise known as DOC SAVAGE!

I had found an adventure of pulp hero Doc Savage, whose exploits began began in 1933, in an eponymous Street & Smith magazine, which endured 181 issues. This was not the magazine but a reissue by Bantam. Doc Savage of the pulps (right) differed vastly from the book cover painted by James Bama, but to the shortest, roundest kid in class both images were godlike. In the story Doc penetrated the Arabian Desert by submarine (!): non-stop action, exotic characters and not too much mushy romance. More exciting was the number "10" on the front cover -- there were at least nine others to track down. I found those nine, but I also found much more.

Although written under the pen name Kenneth Robeson, most of the stories appearing in the monthly magazine were the work of prolific writer Lester Dent (1904 - 1959), and it was he who created Doc Savage and his five assistants, the "brain trust" that helped him save the world, solve mysteries and smash crime. In a time of lawlessness and chaos, when bullets and blood filled the streets of America, when dictators were rising all around the world and we had a chance of getting our own (i,e, America as usual), Doc Savage was just the hero for the job. The advantage held by those who lived during that long ago government-caused Depression over those who now endure a government-caused Depression is, they still believed in heroes who were heroes; still believed in law and order, and the possibility of justice in the legal system; and also in the existence of good and evil (as opposed to appropriate and inappropriate), as well as the triumph of the former over the later. The cynical sophisticates of the 21st Century put up with none of that old-fashioned flummery and naivety. Modern heroes, such as they are, are just badder-assed versions of the bad guys. So, how to explain the continuing popularity of a relic like Doc Savage?

I think it's because hope is not entirely dead in American society, even now. We know superheroes cannot exist in our world (despite antics in Seattle and New York City) but they still remain a popular fixture, and a lucrative one, in print, electronics and film. Because Doc Savage was, and is, a literary hero, he has lagged visually behind those who sprang directly from the graphic world. The one successful attempt to bring Doc Savage to the big screen was the economically disastrous Doc Savage: Man of Bronze in 1975, starring Ron Ely and produced by George Pal. The film could have been much better, but all funding collapsed, and Pal had to rely on anything cheap or free; it's amazing it was finished at all, though some have unkindly claimed it would have been better if it had not. The main trouble, for me, was the portrayal of Doc Savage, but what can you expect when you rely on actors? And here the actor gets no help from tights, cape or mask. He must have muscles, attitude and presence. Pity the poor actor. Besides, Doc's fans already had an image, and it was not Ron Ely. Sorry, Ron.

Well, George Pal and Ron Ely got the shirt right, more or less. That torn and tattered khaki shirt was vintage Doc Savage (below-right) and  artist James Bama reused it (left) for the first Bantam reissue, The Man of Bronze, in which the origin of Doc Savage, his fabulous wealth and his organization are explained; it's also where Doc goes a little berzerker on the murderers of his father...in subsequent stories Doc doesn't kill his enemies, though they are quite often hoisted on their own petards, with survivors usually ending up in Doc's upstate hospital where a little brain surgery rids them of their evil tendencies. Bama's model for his mid-century visions of Doc Savage was actor Steve Holland, who, among other roles, played Flash Gordon on television. With Bama's image in mind, bolstered by Dent's rousing text, it's easy to see why Ely fell a bit short. On the other hand, Doc Savage did quite well on radio (theater of the mind) and in comics.

Of all the many pulp heroes birthed in the turbulent social and economic era of the Great Depression, only The Shadow can claim to have experienced the same sort of enduring fame as Doc Savage. It was the success of the Bantam editions of the Savage stories that caused Pyramid Books to reissue adventures of The Shadow under the pen name of Maxwell Grant (aka Walter Gibson). Though Pyramid's books did not have the same success as Bantam's, they did better than other attempts to resurrect Depression-era heroes: others made the mistake of trying to "modernize" the heroes, a fatal error. Recently, though, another hero, The Spider, is making a comeback in oversize omnibus volumes, and, wisely, the flavor of the era, warts and all, is being retained.

While catching up with the volumes already published by Bantam, I also started purchasing the books as they came out, or tried to...sometimes I missed them, but more often I just could not afford them. Unfortunately, when the government sets minimum wage at less than a dollar an hour employers have no incentive to pay more. I guess I could have told my employers I needed more so I could buy Doc Savage books, but I really don't think the compassion (or the raise) would have been forthcoming. As people grow up, priorities have to be set, and my life was no different. Much later, I lucked out when I lost my job as an editor of nuclear submarine tech manuals at a naval architecture firm...the luck came not in being fired (they say "laid off" but we all know what it really means) but in having a guilt-ridden managing editor; included in the boxes of books he gave me was a mostly complete run of the Bantam Doc Savage.

Guilt is a wonderful thing! Anybody with a mother already knows that, but it's nice not to be on the receiving end for once. Between what I already had and what I was given, I had it all.  "On top of the world, Ma, on top of the world!" Now, years later, I also have new novels by writers other than Lester Dent, comic books (b&w and color editions), radio programs, magazines, the film, new audio productions, fan publications, and lots more. I also have something you don't usually get for a fictional character, a biography, this being Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life. The book is by science fiction writer Phillip Jose Farmer, and in addition to telling the stories of Doc Savage and his men, he also links Doc Savage to other literary lives, such as Sherlock Holmes, James Bond and Wolf Larson. It is a great read in itself, even without reading a single novel.

Though the Bantam books are now out of print, they are not at all hard to find, and they are definitely worth collecting because of the Bama covers. New editions of Doc Savage's pulp-era adventures are currently being published by Nostalgia Ventures, two novels in a single oversized volume. Not only do you get the full text of the stories, but also articles about Lester Dent, Doc Savage, pulp magazine publishing and the times which gave birth to such a larger-than-life hero. In many ways, Doc Savage is more popular now than ever.


Maybe Doc Savage still inhabits the imagination because we still need him. Government fails us at every turn, not just because our leaders have feet of clay and serve "principalities and wickedness in high places," (Ephesians 6:12) but because governments are best at failing...it's what they do, and do well. And real-life heroes reach an apex for only a moment -- after rescuing someone from a fire there is the day after, and the day after that, the tedium of life that does not tolerate heroics; or the hero is corrupted by money or fame. We need heroes to be heroes day after day, and incorruptible. I think that is why Doc Savage remains popular enough for writers and editors to devote lives and fortunes to ensure the fantastic adventures remain in the public eye; and it's why people still plunk down their hard-earned dough (by the way, minimum wage still sucks, and government should stop holding people back) to obtain the books, magazines, artwork, recordings and fan publications. Have no fear, Doc Savage is here!

The Code of Doc Savage

Let me strive every moment of my life to make myself better and better, to the best of my ability, that all may profit by it. Let me think of the right and lend all my assistance to those who need it, with no regard for anything but justice. Let me take what comes with a smile, without loss of courage. Let me be considerate of my country, of my fellow citizens and my associates in everything I say and do. Let me do right to all, and wrong no man.