SPIES AND HOLY WARS by Reeva Spector Simon, reviewed by Robert Irwin - TLS: It was a chance journalistic assignment that took Rohmer to Limehouse and Whitechapel and led him to produce The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu (serialized 1912–13), a novel about the Yellow Peril, after which Rohmer found himself reluctantly tied to his fictional creation, in much the same way as Conan Doyle was not allowed by his readership to kill off Sherlock Holmes. Yet Rohmer’s first enthusiasm had been for the Arab world and more specifically for Cairo, where he spent his honeymoon in 1913. Besides setting The Mask of Fu Manchu in the Middle East, he also produced a string of detective stories under the title Tales of Secret Egypt. (Though Simon claims that the mysterious and resourceful Arab detective, Abu Tabah, who features in several of these stories, is a Sufi, I found no direct evidence of this.) Rohmer’s Chinese master villain was memorably evoked in The Insidious Dr Fu Manchu:
"a person, tall, lean and feline, high shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all of the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government – which, however, has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."