Birthday: Sax Rohmer set a mark that was hard to exceed

Arthur Henry Ward (1883-1959)
Author

Another of the late-Victorian strivers, Ward dropped out of school to find work as a songwriter, comedy sketch writer, civil servant and occasional poet before he stumbled into serial fiction in the Edwardian era.

In 1903, he placed a story with Pearson’s Weekly: a mystery redolent of Poe and Conan Doyle. He was doing well enough to marry in 1909, and in 1912 struck his mother lode with The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu, published under the pen name Sax Rohmer.

The book reflected the acme of British jingo imperialism, and Ward was one of the first writers- after Conan Doyle invented Moriarty- to imagine a shrinking globe in which international criminal masterminds could flourish. Always opposed by a plucky band of British adventurers, not unlike John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, Dr. Fu was regularly beaten but never conquered. The book was serialized in 1912-13, and was followed by three extra adventures through 1917.

That might have been the end of it. Ward was comfortably well off, and- like Conan Doyle- keen not to get stuck cranking out an endless stream of stories about one character.

What changed everything was movies. Ward sold his film rights for a couple of 1920s serials that did well. By decade’s end the arrival of talkies created a new demand for content. Hollywood had optioned Dr. Fu and was preparing a thriller starring Warner Oland, a Swede who made his name playing Asians (he later essayed the role of detective Charlie Chan with great success). With film demand and a newspaper comic strip in the works, Ward relented, and produced ten more Fu Manchu novels between 1931 and 1959.

It is a measure of Ward’s skill that, even by the casually racist standards of the time, his books were protested as offensive. The Chinese government denounced them regularly, especially after the 1932 Hollywood film, in which Dr. Fu’s men terrorize a village under the charge “kill the white men and haul away their women.” That film, which starred Boris Karloff and Myrna Loy, has lived to become  a camp classic for its over-the-topness. There were Fu Manchu comic books, and a radio series in which John Charles Daly, later famous as the suave host of “What’s My Line?”, took the part. Dr Fu’s brand was remolded as knockoff characters like Ming the Merciless in the Flash Gordon series.

Even the Nazi’s banned the Rohmer books in the Thirties, which baffled Ward. The stories, he commented, were “not inimical to their ideals.” In the United States the government asked film producers and publishers to put a hold on Fu Manchu for the duration, as China was a US ally against Japan.

After the war- the Yellow Peril at once vanquished and resurgent as Red China, North Korea, and then Vietnam- Hollywood simple rebooted Fu Manchu again. He sprang up- among others- as Dr. No in the Ian Fleming novel and later movie; as the evil Dr. Zin in the animated 1960s series Jonny Quest; and as Wo Fat in the TV series Hawaii Five-0. Christopher Lee became the eighth film actor to don the moustache in a five-film series in the 1960s. As late as 2013 General Motors had to pull a global ad that referenced “the land of Fu Manchu” in its copy. Asian-American communities protested them with vigor.

Ward insisted that while not all Chinese were bad, the immigrants tended to be the sort didn't who fit in at home, and brought the only trade they knew- crime- with them.

He died in 1959, of complications from a bout with Asian flu.


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