William Patrick Maynard was authorized to continue Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu thrillers for Black Coat Press beginning in 2009. His short fiction has been published by Titan Books, MX Books, EDGE Publishing, among others. He has authored nearly 300 articles for BlackGate.com. His audio commentaries and supplemental content is featured on DVDs and Blu-ray releases from MGM, Shout Factory, Kino-Lorber, and The Serial Squadron. He is a committee member and Assistant Director of Marketing for PulpFest, an annual summer convention celebrating popular fiction and art of the early 20th Century.

February 15th marks 137 years since the birth of Sax Rohmer. Later this year, his most influential and notorious character, the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu will mark 108 years since his first appearance in print. Born Arthur Henry Ward in Birmingham, England; he adopted the bizarre pseudonym of Sax Rohmer to reflect his fascination with the occult and what was then considered the mysterious East. Rohmer was a prolific, if sometimes formulaic, writer of bestselling thrillers who consistently delivered the goods right up to his ironic death of Asiatic flu in 1959.

Like H. C. “Sapper” McNeile, the creator of Bulldog Drummond, Rohmer is an author whose influence on popular culture remains pervasive to this day even as his own works slip into obscurity. Such authors whose works have fallen out of fashion with changing mores and worldviews become the purview of nostalgia buffs and public domain presses specializing in obscure treasures of the past. Fu Manchu’s influence can be felt strongly among James Bond and Marvel supervillains with their grand schemes for global domination as well as the interplanetary machinations of Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon or the sorcerous opponents faced by Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian.

For those seeking an excellent sampling of Sax Rohmer at the height of his powers, a relatively obscure title featuring one of Rohmer’s most intriguing villains in his sole literary appearance can be recommended to the curious. The Golden Scorpion was first printed in its entirety in The Illustrated London News Christmas Number in December 1918. It was published in book form in the UK the following year by Methuen and in the US in 1920 by McBride & Nast.

Despite featuring several characters from Rohmer’s 1915 novel, The Yellow Claw, The Golden Scorpion marked a return to the style and feel of Rohmer’s Fu Manchu thrillers. Rohmer maintained the more realistic Limehouse crime novel approach of The Yellow Claw for his contemporaneous “Red” Kerry detective series which started with Dope (1919), but he chose to fashion The Golden Scorpion from the same “Yellow Peril” weird menace cloth that made his reputation as an author. The key difference from the Fu Manchu thrillers is that Rohmer maintains a third-person narrative voice (as he had in The Yellow Claw) rather than recreating the frantic paranoia that marked Dr. Petrie’s first-person narratives.

Dr. Keppel Stuart, the principal character in the book, makes a nice stand-in for Petrie. The good doctor is awakened in his bed one night by the sound of someone in his downstairs study. Investigating, he finds an intruder has been searching through his papers and glimpses a mysterious hooded figure who disappears into thin air before his disbelieving eyes. The next morning Stuart’s motherly landlady, Mrs. M’Gregor warns him against his latest patient, the wealthy and exotic Mademoiselle Dorian, with whom the young doctor is quite smitten. The kind-hearted Scotswoman has a premonition that no good will come of the bachelor doctor associating with this exotic beauty. Naturally, being a Rohmer novel, Mademoiselle Dorian is a seductive Eurasian with traces of both Egyptian and French blood in her veins (just like Karamaneh in the Fu Manchu books).

Before long, Inspector Dunbar of Scotland Yard turns up to consult with Dr. Stuart about a rare piece he has found on a murdered man fished out of the Thames. The piece in question is the gold likeness of a scorpion tail. The Inspector is curious if Stuart has knowledge of an Eastern cult of scorpion worshipers. He hasn’t, but the doctor recalls a strange encounter with a veiled man known as the Scorpion he chanced upon while in China five years earlier. The veiled man was feared by the Chinese villagers, but they would not speak of the man to a foreigner.

The Inspector informs Stuart that the Surete had alerted Scotland Yard six months ago to be wary of anything to do with a scorpion and more recently suggested that the sudden death of the eminent surgeon, Sir Frank Narcombe, was somehow connected to this scorpion mystery as well. Nothing had turned up until a golden scorpion tail was found sewn in the lining of the murdered man’s coat. Scotland Yard has identified the corpse as the Surete’s celebrated criminologist Gaston Max who was investigating this scorpion mystery in London without Scotland Yard’s knowledge for the past month.

While Dr. Stuart agrees to assist Inspector Dunbar on his case, Mrs. M’Gregor shows Mademoiselle Dorian into the doctor’s study to wait for him. Left alone, Mademoiselle Dorian rifles through the doctor’s files and is shocked when she discovers the scorpion tail. She quickly makes a telephone call identifying herself as Miska and reports what she has discovered. Hanging up, she throws a sealed envelope she took from the doctor’s files into the hearth to burn when she is interrupted by Dr. Stuart.

Keppel holds her against her will and questions her, correctly guessing that she is involved with the hooded man who broke into his study, the golden scorpion’s tail, and the death of Sir Frank Narcombe. Warning him that this knowledge has endangered his life, Mademoiselle Dorian breaks free and escapes his clutches. As Stuart tells Dunbar the whole story, the reader learns the mystery actually began a few days earlier when the doctor befriended a taxi driver who entrusted him with a sealed envelope that a passenger left behind in his cab. The driver leaves the envelope with the doctor for safekeeping hoping to reclaim it in exchange for a reward when the passenger contacts the depot. This was the same sealed envelope that Mademoiselle Dorian threw into the hearth before Stuart hastily retrieved it.

Eagerly, Dunbar breaks the seal only to discover nothing but a small cardboard square free of any markings inside the envelope. Stuart informs the Inspector that the seal is the imprint of a Chinese coin. When he reaches into his collection to show Dunbar proof he finds a strip of cardboard with a small square cut out of it. Inexplicably, Keppel Stuart realizes that someone must have cut out the cardboard piece and sealed it with a Chinese coin from his own collection after first purloining the original contents of the sealed envelope.

The next day, a taxi passes Stuart on the street and Mademoiselle Dorian drops a note out the window. Stuart retrieves the note and finds a hand-written warning to close his shutters at night. The doctor begins researching Scotland Yard files on the recent mysterious deaths of Sir Frank Narcombe, Norwegian scientist Dr. Henrik Ericksen, and the Grand Duke Ivan. Stuart chooses to ignore Mademoiselle Dorian’s warning and while studying the files only narrowly manages to avoid a needle-thin blue ray of light which enters through his open window and completely obliterates the mouthpiece of the telephone he was holding.

Intrigued? I would recommend the excellent double volume of Gaston Max Mysteries: The Yellow Claw / The Golden Scorpion from Stark House Mystery Classics. It is the second of three Sax Rohmer double volume collections from the publisher and features an introduction by a passionate, possibly fanatical Rohmer authority (myself). All three Sax Rohmer double volumes from Stark House make fitting companions to Titan Books’ reprinting of all fourteen Rohmer Fu Manchu titles (the first uniform edition in single volumes). Collect them all, if you dare.