Prolific British author Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, who wrote under the pseudonym Sax Rohmer, brought to life the character Dr. Fu-Manchu, a brilliant criminal mastermind of Chinese descent. This archetype has gone on to become enormously appealing in popular culture, based in large part on the ingenious characterization that Rohmer sketched out in the Fu-Manchu series.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ...of a gaunt and prowling cat. Bestowing a suspicious glance upward in my direction, the animal slunk away toward the path bordering the cutting. By a devious route amid ghostly gasometers I had crept to my post in the early dusk, before the moon was risen, and already I was heartily weary of my passive part in the affair of the night. I had never before appreciated the multitudinous sounds, all of them weird and many of them horrible, which are within the compass of those great black rats who find their way to England with cargoes from Russia and elsewhere. From the rafters above my head, from the wall recesses about me, from the floor beneath my feet, proceeded a continuous and nerve-shattering concert, an unholy symphony which seemingly accompanied the eternal dance of the rats. Sometimes a faint splash from below would tell of one of the revelers taking the water, but save for the more distant throbbing of riverside industry, and rarer note of shipping, the mad discords of this rat saturnalia alone claimed the ear. The hour was nigh now, when matters should begin to develop. I followed the chimes from the clock of some church nearby--I have never learnt its name; and was conscious of a thrill of excitement when they warned me that the hour was actually arrived.... A strange figure appeared noiselessly, from I knew not where, and stood fully within view upon the bridge crossing the cutting, peering to right and left, in an attitude of listening. It was the figure of a bedraggled old woman, gray-haired, and carrying a large bundle tied up in what appeared to be a red shawl. Of her face I could see little, since it was shaded by the brim of her black bonnet, but she rested her bundle upon the low wall of the bridge, and, to my intense surprise, ..

The adventure-filled novels that introduced the world to the classic supervillain and his criminal organization. The most brilliant criminal the world has ever seen, Fu-Manchu is an expert polyglot and master chemist, adept in the manipulation of the rarest and deadliest poisons. An agent of a secret society bent on controlling the world, his mere gaze is enough to dull the sharpest minds of Great Britain. It is up to police commissioner Nayland Smith and his loyal friend Dr. Petrie to track the devil doctor from the opium dens of the East End to the deserts of Egypt and put an end to his fiendish plans . . . This series, originally written nearly a century ago, has become not only a pop-culture phenomenon—with the character Fu-Manchu appearing in films, on television, on the radio, and in comics—but also the subject of controversies and conversations about attitudes toward Asians at the time, as well as the historical relationship between East and West. This volume includes the first three novels in this wild adventure series: The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, and The Hand of Fu-Manchu.

This collection contains The Daughter of Fu-Manchu, The Mask of Fu-Manchu, and Fu-Manchu's Bride.

In the twelfth of the perilous adventures of Nayland Smith, the top British agent is once again pitted against the fiendish devices of the keenest criminal genius in history. For Fu-Manchu, long thought dead, is on the scene again—and the great cities of London, Cairo and New York know the shadow of his sinister presence...

This book is one of the first scholarly analyses of the current social constructions of Chinese American masculinities. Arguing that many of these notions are limited to stereotypes, Chan goes beyond this to present a more complex understanding of the topic. Incorporating historical references, literary analysis and sociological models to describe the construct a variety of masculine identities, Chan also examines popular novels (Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan), films (Bruce Lee), comic books (Master of Kung Fu), and literature (M. Butterfly).

This volume contains bio-critical information on popular writers of the genre.