The Insidious Dr Fu Manchu

Sax Rohmer’s The Insidious Dr Fu Manchu includes some of the original stories featuring the Chinese character Fu Manchu who has become very popular in cinema, television, radio and even comic books. The novel is also populated by other characters such as Nayland Smith, an Orientalist explorer, and Karamaneh who claims to be enslaved by Fu Manchu. Rohmer presents the latter as a literal incarnation of evil. He is a man with a strongly-built body and a genius for immaculate crimes. The reader is mostly entertained by his dexterity and extremely clever tricks as well as by the way he continually manages to escape from punishment. His Western victims are often lured into his snares by the captivating beauty of the Eastern woman that he sends or by a variety of exotic Chinese potions and concoctions. One basic feature of Rohmer’s early-twentieth-century fiction is the way it negatively portrays Asians and Asian culture. Indeed, in addition to all the wickedness that the character of Fu Manchu ejects, the novel wrongly caricatures Asians as sexist, cold-hearted and cruel, claiming that they practice female infanticide. Chinese females who survive are also expected to be completely submissive to male figures.