Lambeth Fantastical - Episode Two
The Fiendish Plots of Sax Rohmer
My next LambethFantastical guided walk is in Herne Hill on the evening of June 24th. I will be exploring the connections between the area and the genres of scifi, horror and the fantastical. Details are here if you would like to join me.
Fiendish Plots and Fantastic Journeys
Central to the walk will be the lives and works of five former residents of the area, who all have connections to elements of the fantastical, and who are all featured on the Wonderful Walk, a mural which runs the full length of the underpass beneath Herne Hill Station and features a host of famous residents of the area.
These include the writer, Sax Rohmer, depicted above. Towards the top of Herne Hill itself there is a blue plaque on the house where he lived with his wife during the period when he wrote the highly successful and, by today's standards, highly controversial series of novels featuring the archetypal global super villain, Fu Manchu.
Rohmer, real name, Arthur Henry Ward, had a background as a writer of sketches and monologues for London’s musical hall acts before becoming a fiction writer. He was also the ghost writer on the biography of well known music hall performer Little Titch. His wife, Rose Knox, was part of a music hall juggling act. Her brother was Teddy Knox a member of the famous comedy crew The Crazy Gang, along with Flannigan and Allen and Jimmy Nervo. His monologue ‘The Pigtail of Li-Fang-Fu’, witten for Bransby Williams in 1919 presents a Chinese villain who runs an opium den in London’s East End.
This capitalised on his character Fu Manchu who first appeared in a short story entitled ‘The Zayat Kiss’. He went on to feature in fourteen novels written by Rohmer and two posthumous novel written his assistant Cay Van Ash.
The inspiration for the character of Fu Manchu also has his roots in music hall. Ching Ling Fu (real name Chee Ling Qua) was born in Beijing 1854 and became a well respected magician in China before making a name for himself on stage in America and becoming a close friend of Harry Houdini. While in New York he set up a publicity stunt whereby he offered a reward of $1000 to anyone who reproduce one of his elaborate tricks. A New York magician called William Robinson made the attempt but his efforts were rejected. Stinging from the rebuff Robinson copied Ching Ling Fu’s act, dressing and making himself up to look Chinese and touring Europe under the name Chung Ling Soo.
Rohmer claimed that idea of creating a Chinese villain for his stories came about as a consquence of a Ouija board spelling out the letters C-H-I-N-A-M-A-N when he asked what might make him his fortune.
In the novels Doctor Fu Manchu became the archetypal global villain / mad scientist who increasingly dabbled in the occult and supernatural to assist in the delivery of his dastardly deeds and fiendish plots. As part of his masterplan he set up an international crime synicate know as the Sci-Fan. A century and more after his creation Rohmer has been critised for creating a steriotypical Chinese character.
In the time period that the books were written China was seen as a major threat to Western Imperialism. The Boxer Rebellion in 1902, followed by the rise of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Kuomintang in the 1920s, and Mao Zedong’s Communist Red Army in the 30s and 40s put the wind up the west and the somewhat racist term ‘yellow peril’ was coined to describe the percieved threat.
Rohmer’s novels clearly played up to this, with Fu Manchu being an avowed enemy of Imperialism, out to overthrow the world order. He would also in later novels fight against both Fascism and Communism. In his depiction of Fu Manchu’s motives Rohmer was visting similar territory to Jules Verne. Verne’s character, Captain Nemo, had started off life as Prince Dakar, a member of Indian nobility under the rule of the British Empire, whose hatred of war and imperialism was said to have been spurred by the slaughter of his family at the hands of the British.
Rohmer wasn’t necessarly stereotypical in his discriptions of Fu Manchu. He depicts him as having look of Shakespeare about him and possessing an intelligence far superior to those of Sir Denis Nayland Smith and Dr Petrie, the Holmes and Watson type duo who are forever one step behind in trying to thwart him. He is said to possess no less than four doctorates from four different western univesities. Smith and Petrie are constantly awed by his intellect and in one book where the villian is proported to have died they attend his funeral as a mark of respect for what they describe as the greatest mind ever known to to humanity.
What probably sealed the fate of Fu Manchu and consigned him to be described as a stereotype is the numerous cinematic interpretations. In the early 1920s Harry Agar- Smith, a white actor made up to appear oriental, starred in two silent matinee serials ‘The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu’ and ‘The Further Mysteries of Dr Fu-Manchu’.
This set off an unfortunate trend for white actors playing the role. There were numerous Fu Manchu movies from the 1930s to the 1960’s. Those who played the role of the master villain include, Warner Oland, Boris Karloff, John Carradine and Christopher Lee (who played the character no less than five times). There were also Spanish and Mexican versions, neither of which cast Chinese actors.
The only film which bucked the trend was ‘Daughter of the Dragon’ (1931) which cast Chinese American actress Anna May Wong in the lead role, however still with Warner Oland made up to appear as her father, Fu Manchu. There was also one occassion when a studio was asked to withdraw Fu Manchu from movie theatres for fear of offending the Chinese community. This was ‘Drums of Fu Manchu’ (1940) another fifteen part cinema serial. It’s temporary withdrawal had less to do with some new found sensitivity amongst the authorities and more to do with wanting to keep the Chinese on side as tensions with Japan excalated.
The last actor to play Fu Manchu in a full length film was Peter Sellers in the 1980 adaptation ‘The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu’, in which he also took on the role the detective Nyland Smith. The film was played for laughs and ends with Sellers in an Elvis style jump suit and full oriental make up singing a song called Rock-a-Fu Manchu. Riding high on his success as inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies Fu Manchu was planned to be a trilogy of movies, but Seller’s death in July of that year put paid to that.
It’s probably just as well that another two Seller’s Fu Manchu movies were never saw the light of day, because another film released in 1981 caused a huge backlash from the Asian American commutity. ‘Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen’ starred Peter Ustinov as the celebrated Chinese detective and Angie Dickinson as the Dragon Queen, a character based on Rohmer’s Fah Lo Sueeh, the daughter of Fu Manchu in the novels. It also had Richard Hatch, formerly Apollo in the orginal Battlestar Galactica TV series, as Chan’s granson, Lee Chan, and Rohmer’s former Herne Hill neighbour, Roddy McDowall, as an American police detective. The use of no less than three white actors made up to appear as the lead Chinese characters led to protests and demonstations outside the studio and cinemas where the movie was being shown, effectively ensuring that no further Ustinov Charlie Chan movies were ever made.
An interesting article on shameful cinematic phenomenon of ‘yellow face’ can be found on the World of Chinese Cinema link below.
Fu Manchu did make another cinematic appearance in a short sequence which formed a parody trailer for the 2007 Quentin Tarrantino / Robert Rodrigues collaboration ‘Grindhouse’. The trailer is for an imaginary move called ‘Werewolf Women of the SS’. While Cage hams it up in full oriental costume and Fu Manchu moustache he avoided being made up to look Chinese.
Following Anna May Wong’s portrail of Fu Manchu’s daugher a further 4 actresses would take on the role - Myrna Loy, Gloria Franklin, and Laurette Luez. But it wasn’t until the Christopher Lee movies of the 1960s that another Chinese actress played the role. Tsai Chin, who also had parts in ‘Casino Royal’, ‘You Only Live Twice’ and ‘The World of Suzie Wong’, played Fah Lo Sueeh in all of the five movies in the series.
Rohmer also created a female international supervillian, Sumuru, much in the vein of Fu Manchu. Orginally written as a BBC Radio serial the storyline formed the plot for a novel that was published as a novel in 1950. Over the next five years four more Sumuru novels were published. Like Fu Manchu before her Sumuru leads an international crime synicate. This time it’s called The Order of Our Lady. Its aim is to recruit beautiful women who are used seduce and exploit men in order to establish a matriarchal world order.
The Sumuru character was again played prodomently by white actresses - Anna Burden in the radio serial, Goldfinger Bond girl, Shirley Eaton, in the two 1960’s films ‘The Million Eyes of Sumuru’ and ‘The Girl from Rio, and by Alexandra Camp in 2003’s ‘Sumuru’.
Meanwhile the character of Fu Manchu was a clear influence on the Ming the Merciless character in the Flash Gordon comic strips and movies, a well as the main villian in Ian Fleming’s Doctor No. In recent years characters based on Fu Manchu have popped up in Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula and Ben Aaronovich’s River of London series.
For more stories about Herne Hill residents with links and connections to the fantastical come for a walk with me on June 24th.
Maggie’s House
Maggie’s House is my new horror novel, out now on Gravestone Press. As a taster I am going to publish the opening paragraphs of each chapter each time I publish a post. I’ll also be blogging about 1973 and some of things that inspired the story on my Gravestone Press authors page.
Maggie’s House - Chapter One
Our lives are often built on lies. They come in all shapes and sizes. Big lies and small lies. Lies told out of compassion to protect someone we care for. Lies told out of malice to hurt someone we despise. Lies which cover up dark secrets. Lies are the mechanisms by which we compensate for our faults and our regrets. The bad things we wish we’d never done. Sometimes lies are simply the things that are never spoken out loud.
I’ve had it with lies.
I’m going to come clean about what happened in Maggie’s house.
It started with the three of us walking along an old railway track one sun scorched morning. The story I’m about to tell had furrowed its foul, creeping roots deep into the soil of the past long before that. But that day in the summer of 1973 is as good a place as any for me start.
Back then the track was a dark scar that slashed its way across a long swathe of countryside. A scar that reeked of its past industrial history, surface so black that you could smell the decades of soot and dust that had been ground into the dirt. Ragged shards of coal fallen from long ago steam trains that crunched under foot like fine gravel, releasing a sulphurous stench when they cracked.
Blog - Maggie's House - Lies and Deception
Horror on a Summer Night
Maggie’s house is set during a scorching hot summer in 1973. I will be reading from the novel and exploring horror fiction in novels and films with guest readers and fellow Gravestones Press authors, Gary Budgen and Joseph Dowling, at this free online event - Horror on a Summer Night on the evening of the 20th July.
Horror on a Summer Night