Why, Doctor, What Big Green Eyes You Have!

Halfway through the summer of 1916, I was living on the rim of Narragansett Bay, a fur-­bearing adolescent with cheeks as yet unscarred by my first Durham Duplex razor, when I read a book that exerted a considerable influence on my bedtime habits. Up to then, I had slept in normal twelve-­year-­old fashion, with the lights full on, a blanket muffling my head from succubi and afreets, a chair wedged under the doorknob, and a complex network of strings stretched across the room in a way scientifically designed to entrap any trespasser, corporeal or not. On finishing the romance in question, however, I realized that the protection I had been relying on was woefully inadequate and that I had merely been crowding my luck. Every night thereafter, before retiring, I spent an extra half hour barricading the door with a chest of drawers, sprinkling tacks along the window sills, and strewing crumpled newspapers about the floor to warn me of approaching footsteps. As a minor added precaution, I slept under the bed, a ruse that did not make for refreshing slumber but at least threw my enemies off the scent. Whether it was constant vigilance or natural stamina, I somehow survived, and, indeed, received a surprising number of compliments on my appearance when I returned to grammar school that fall. I guess nobody in those parts had ever seen a boy with snow-­white hair and a green skin.

Perhaps the hobgoblins who plagued me in that Rhode Island beach cottage were no more virulent than the reader’s own childhood favorites, but the particular one I was introduced to in the book I’ve mentioned could hold up his head in any concourse of fiends. Even after thirty-­five years, the lines that ushered him onstage still cause an involuntary shudder:

“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. . . . This man, whether a fanatic or a duly appointed agent, is, unquestionably, the most malign and formidable personality existing in the world today. He is a linguist who speaks with almost equal facility in any of the civilized languages, and in most of the barbaric. He is an adept in all the arts and sciences which a great university could teach him. He also is an adept in certain obscure arts and sciences which no university of today can teach. He has the brains of any three men of genius. . . . Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-­Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”

Yes, it is the reptilian Doctor himself, one of the most sinister figures ever to slither out of a novelist’s cranium, and many a present-­day comic book, if the truth were told, is indebted to his machinations, his underground laboratories, carnivorous orchids, rare Oriental poisons, dacoits, and stranglers. An authentic vampire in the great tradition, Fu-­Manchu horrified the popular imagination in a long series of best sellers by Sax Rohmer, passed through several profitable reincarnations in Hollywood, and (I thought) retired to the limbo of the second-­hand bookshop, remembered only by a few slippered pantaloons like me. Some while ago, though, a casual reference by my daughter to Thuggee over her morning oatmeal made me prick up my ears. On close questioning, I found she had been bedeviling herself with The Mystery of Dr. Fu-­Manchu, the very volume that had induced my youthful fantods. I delivered a hypocritical little lecture, worthy of Pecksniff, in which I pointed out that Laurence Hope’s Indian Love was far more suitable for her age level, and, confiscating the book, holed up for a retrospective look at it. I see now how phlegmatic I have become with advancing age. Apart from causing me to cry out occasionally in my sleep and populating my pillow with a swarm of nonexistent spiders, Rohmer’s thriller was as abrasive to the nerves as a cup of Ovaltine.

The plot of The Mystery of Dr. Fu-­Manchu is at once engagingly simple and monstrously confused. In essence, it is a duel of wits between the malevolent Celestial, who dreams of a world dominated by his countrymen, and Commissioner Nayland Smith, a purportedly brilliant sleuth, whose confidant, Dr. Petrie, serves as narrator. Fu-­Manchu comes to England bent on the extermination of half a dozen distinguished Foreign Office servants, Orientalists, and other buttinskies privy to his scheme; Smith and Petrie constantly scud about in a webfooted attempt to warn the prey, who are usually defunct by the time they arrive, or busy themselves with being waylaid, sandbagged, drugged, kidnaped, poisoned, or garroted by Fu-­Manchu’s deputies. These assaults, however, are never downright lethal, for regularly, at the eleventh hour, a beautiful slave of Fu-­Manchu named Kâramanèh betrays her master and delivers the pair from jeopardy. The story, consequently, has somewhat the same porous texture as a Pearl White serial. An episode may end with Smith and Petrie plummeting through a trap door to nameless horrors below; the next opens on them comfortably sipping whisky-­and-­soda in their chambers, analyzing their hairbreadth escape and speculating about the adversary’s next move. To synopsize this kind of ectoplasmic yarn with any degree of fidelity would be to connive at criminal boredom, and I have no intention of doing so, but it might be fruitful to dip a spoon into the curry at random to gain some notion of its flavor.

Lest doubt prevail at the outset as to the utter malignancy of Fu-­Manchu, the author catapults Nayland Smith into Petrie’s rooms in the dead of night with the following portentous declaration of his purpose: “Petrie, I have traveled from Burma not in the interests of the British government merely, but in the interest of the entire white race, and I honestly believe—though I pray I may be wrong—that its survival depends largely on the success of my mission.” Can Petrie, demands Smith, spare a few days from his medical duties for “the strangest business, I promise you, that ever was recorded in fact or fiction”? He gets the expected answer: “I agreed readily enough, for, unfortunately, my professional duties were not onerous.” The alacrity with which doctors of that epoch deserted their practice has never ceased to impress me. Holmes had only to crook his finger and Watson went bowling away in a four-­wheeler, leaving his patients to fend for themselves. If the foregoing is at all indicative, the mortality rate of London in the nineteen hundreds must have been appalling; the average physician seems to have spent much less time in diagnosis than in tiptoeing around Wapping Old Stairs with a dark lantern. The white race, apparently, was a lot tougher than one would suspect.

At any rate, the duo hasten forthwith to caution a worthy named Sir Crichton Davey that his life is in peril, and, predictably, discover him already cheesed off. His death, it develops, stemmed from a giant red centipede, lowered down the chimney of his study by Fu-­Manchu’s dacoits, regarding whom Smith makes the charmingly offhand statement “Oh, dacoity, though quiescent, is by no means extinct.” Smith also seizes the opportunity to expatiate on the archcriminal in some delicious double-­talk: “As to his mission among men. Why did M. Jules Furneaux fall dead in a Paris opera house? Because of heart failure? No! Because his last speech had shown that he held the key to the secret of Tongking. What became of the Grand Duke Stanislaus? Elopement? Suicide? Nothing of the kind. He alone was fully alive to Russia’s growing peril. He alone knew the truth about Mongolia. Why was Sir Crichton Davey murdered? Because, had the work he was engaged upon ever seen the light, it would have shown him to be the only living Englishman who understood the importance of the Tibetan frontiers.” In between these rhetorical flourishes, Petrie is accosted by Kâramanèh, Fu-­Manchu’s houri, who is bearing a deadly perfumed letter intended to destroy Smith. The device fails, but the encounter begets a romantic interest that saves Petrie’s neck on his next excursion. Disguised as rough seafaring men, he and Smith have tracked down Fu-­Manchu at Singapore Charlie’s, an opium shop on the Thames dockside. Here, for the first time, Petrie gets a good hinge at the monster’s eyes: “. . . their unique horror lay in a certain filminess (it made me think of the membrana nictitans in a bird) which, obscuring them as I threw wide the door, seemed to lift as I actually passed the threshold, revealing the eyes in all their brilliant viridescence.” Before he can polish his ornithological metaphor, however, Petrie is plunged through a trap door into the river, the den goes up in flames, and it looks like curtains for the adventurous physician. But Providence, in the form of a hideous old Chinese, intervenes. Stripping off his ugly, grinning mask, he discloses himself as Kâramanèh; she extends her false pigtail to Petrie and, after pulling him to safety, melts into the night. It is at approximately this juncture that one begins to appreciate how lightly the laws of probability weighed on Sax Rohmer. Once you step with him into Never-­Never Land, the grave’s the limit, and no character is deemed extinct until you can use his skull as a paperweight.

Impatient at the snail’s pace with which his conspiracy is maturing, Fu-­Manchu now takes the buttons off the foils. He tries to abduct a missionary who has flummoxed his plans in China, but succeeds only in slaying the latter’s collie and destroying his manservant’s memory—on the whole, a pretty footling morning’s work. He then pumps chlorine gas into a sarcophagus belonging to Sir Lionel Barton, a bothersome explorer, with correspondingly disappointing results; this time the bag is another collie—sorry, a coolie—and a no-­account ginzo secretary.

The villain’s next foray is more heartening. He manages to overpower Smith and Petrie by some unspecified means (undoubtedly the “rather rare essential oil” that Smith says he has met with before, “though never in Europe”) and chains them up in his noisome cellars. The scene wherein he twits his captives has a nice poetic lilt: “A marmoset landed on the shoulder of Dr. Fu-­Manchu and peered grotesquely into the dreadful yellow face. The Doctor raised his bony hand and fondled the little creature, crooning to it. ‘One of my pets, Mr. Smith,’ he said, suddenly opening his eyes fully so that they blazed like green lamps. ‘I have others, equally useful. My scorpions—have you met my scorpions? No? My pythons and hamadryads? Then there are my fungi and my tiny allies, the bacilli. I have a collection in my laboratory quite unique. Have you ever visited Molokai, the leper island, Doctor? No? But Mr. Nayland Smith will be familiar with the asylum at Rangoon! And we must not forget my black spiders, with their diamond eyes—my spiders, that sit in the dark and watch—then leap!’ ” Yet, having labored to create so auspicious a buildup, the author inexplicably cheats his suspense and lets it go for naught. No sooner has Fu-­Manchu turned his back to attend to a poisoned soufflé in the oven than Kâramanèh pops up and strikes off the prisoners’ gyves, and the whole grisly quadrille starts all over again. Smith and Petrie, without so much as a change of deerstalker hats, nip away to warn another prospective victim, and run full tilt into a covey of phansigars, the religious stranglers familiar to devotees of the American Weekly as Thugs. They outwit them, to be sure, but the pace is beginning to tell on Petrie, who observes ruefully, “In retrospect, that restless time offers a chaotic prospect, with few peaceful spots amid its turmoils.” Frankly, I don’t know what Petrie is beefing about. My compassion goes out, rather, to his patients, whom I envision by now as driven by default to extracting their own tonsils and quarrying each other’s gallstones. They’re the ones who need sympathy, Petrie, old boy.

With puff adders, tarantulas, and highbinders blooming in every hedgerow, the hole-­and-­corner pursuit of Fu-­Manchu drums along through the next hundred pages at about the same tempo, resolutely shying away from climaxes like Hindus from meat. Even the episode in which Smith and Petrie, through the good offices of Kâramanèh, eventually hold the Doctor at gun point aboard his floating laboratory in the Thames proves just a pretext for further bombination about those filmy greenish eyes; a shower of adjectives explodes in the reader’s face, and he is whisked off on a hunt for certain stolen plans of an aero-­torpedo, an interlude that veers dangerously close to the exploits of the indomitable Tom Swift. The sequence that follows, as rich in voodoo as it is innocent of logic, is heavily fraught with hypnosis, Fu-­Manchu having unaccountably imprisoned a peer named Lord Southery and Kâramanèh’s brother Aziz in a cataleptic trance. They are finally revived by injections of a specific called the Golden Elixir—a few drops of which I myself could have used to advantage at this point—and the story sashays fuzzily into its penultimate phase. Accompanied by a sizable police detail, Smith, Petrie, and a Scotland Yard inspector surprise Fu-­Manchu in an opium sleep at his hideout. A denouement seems unavoidable, but if there was one branch of literary hopscotch Rohmer excelled in, it was avoiding denouements. When the three leaders of the party recover consciousness (yes, the indispensable trap door again, now on a wholesale basis), they lie bound and gagged in a subterranean vault, watching their captor sacrifice their subordinates by pelting them with poisonous toadstools. The prose rises to an almost lyrical pitch: “Like powdered snow the white spores fell from the roof, frosting the writhing shapes of the already poisoned men. Before my horrified gaze, the fungus grew; it spread from the head to the feet of those it touched; it enveloped them as in glittering shrouds. ‘They die like flies!’ screamed Fu-­Manchu, with a sudden febrile excitement; and I felt assured of something I had long suspected: that that magnificent, perverted brain was the brain of a homicidal maniac—though Smith would never accept the theory.” Since no hint is given of what theory Smith preferred, we have to fall back on conjecture. More than likely, he smiled indulgently under his gag and dismissed the whole escapade as the prankishness of a spoiled, self-­indulgent child.

The ensuing events, while gaudy, are altogether too labyrinthine to unravel. As a matter of fact they puzzled Rohmer, too. He says helplessly, “Any curiosity with which this narrative may leave the reader burdened is shared by the writer.” After reading that, my curiosity shrank to the vanishing point; I certainly wasn’t going to beat my brains out over a riddle the author himself did not pretend to understand. With a superhuman effort, I rallied just enough inquisitiveness to turn to the last page for some clue to Fu-­Manchu’s end. It takes place, as nearly as I could gather, in a blazing cottage outside London, and the note he addresses to his antagonists clears the way for plenty of sequels. “To Mr. Commissioner Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie—Greeting! I am recalled home by One who may not be denied. In much that I came to do I have failed. Much that I have done I would undo; some little I have undone. Out of fire I came—the smoldering fire of a thing one day to be a consuming flame; in fire I go. Seek not my ashes. I am the lord of the fires! Farewell. Fu-­Manchu.”

I daresay it was the combination of this passage, the cheery hearth in front of which I reread it, and my underwrought condition, but I thought I detected in the Doctor’s valedictory an unmistakable mandate. Rising stealthily, I tiptoed up to my daughter’s bedchamber and peered in. A shaft of moonlight picked out her ankles protruding from beneath the bed, where she lay peacefully sleeping, secure from dacoity and Thuggee. Obviously, it would take more than a little crackle of the flames below to arouse her. I slipped downstairs and, loosening the binding of The Mystery of Dr. Fu-­Manchu to insure a good supply of oxygen, consigned the lord of the fires to his native element. As he crumbled into ash, I could have sworn I smelled a rather rare essential oil and felt a pair of baleful green eyes fixed on me from the staircase. It was probably the cat, though I really didn’t take the trouble to check. I just strolled into the kitchen, made sure there was no trap door under the icebox, and curled up for the night. That’s how phlegmatic a chap gets in later life.