The Yellow Peril by Christopher Frayling

Author:Christopher Frayling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson

CHAPTER FIVE

‘The Yellow Peril Incarnate in One Man’

The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu started life in October 1912 as a series of interconnected short stories, many of which were eccentric variations on the locked-room mystery which went right back to Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) and which had recently become popular among readers of detective stories with Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908) and Jacques Futrelle’s short story ‘The Problem of Cell 13’ (1907). The first story, ‘The Zayat Kiss’, also introduced readers to Nayland Smith – ex-District Commissioner, ‘late of Mandalay’ – his friend and the narrator Dr Petrie and, in Smith’s classic description, to Dr Fu Manchu himself. Petrie has asked Smith the question, ‘What perverted genius controls this awful secret movement?’ Smith replies:

Imagine 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 the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government – which, however, already 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.

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