Daughter of Fu Manchu

Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1931. Octavo, yellow cloth with bold black lettering on front cover and spine, 316 pp. A little mild discolouration affects the top edge of the boards, otherwise a fresh and attractive copy in the jacket. The dust-jacket itself is splitting at the folds and a bit chipped, with a localised tape repair to the rear panel. First American edition.

Arthur Henry 'Sarsfield' Ward, Sax Rohmer, was a prolific British music hall comedy sketch writer, poet, and fiction writer. Rohmer's interests for ancient Egypt, East Asia, the Middle East, and the occult led him into fiction writing. Between 1912 and 1913, he published The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (later rebaptised The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu) in serialised form. This marked the success of a long book series constituted of thirteen books revolving around the mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu, a criminal mastermind and user of arcane methods, who, for most of the series, plots for world domination only to be stopped by his archnemesis, Sir Denis Nayland Smith, a police commissioner in the Indian Imperial Police.

Some have argued that the character of Fu Manchu was based on American music hall magician William Ellsworth Robinson going by the stage name of Chung Ling Soo and who wore a Mandarin costume and pigtail during his performances. Fu Manchu, who seldom appeared on the page, and his daughter, Fah Lo Suee, were a distorted projection of Rohmer's stereotypes and racism towards Chinese culture and its people which contributed in misrepresenting the Chinese community.

Daughter of Fu Manchu was published fourteen years after The Si-Fan Mysteries. Dr. Fu Manchu has been dead for several years now and yet there are those who doubt as to whether such a man could really have been killed. Meanwhile, Sir Lionel Barton, an archaeologist dies in mysterious circumstances at an archaeological site in Egypt. Shan Greville, Barton's assistant receives a message which leads him to think that perhaps Sir Lionel may not be dead after all. As Greville confides in Dr Petrie, the latter notices uncanny similarities to earlier cases in which Dr Fu Manchu was involved. Soon they find themselves engaged in a battle of wits with Lady Fah Lo Suee, the daughter of Fu Manchu.