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The Green Spider: and Other Forgotten Tales of Mystery and Suspense
—A prominent scientist-killed by a gigantic green spider ... —The mysterious mummy that looted a London museum... —An "impossible" murder on the English moors... The modern pirates who plundered the idle rich of Southborne... —A weird malady that tormented denizens of a country estate... —The most fiendish torture ever devised by the devilish Dr. Fu Manchu! These and more thrilling adventures await the reader in these thirteen rare works of intrigue by the incomparable Sax Rohmer collected in The Green Spider and Other Forgotten Tales of Mystery and Suspense—including four stories never previously published in the United States! Edited and with an introduction by Gene Christie. Cover art by Tom Roberts.
186 pages, Paperback
First published March 30, 2011
15 people want to read
About the author
Sax Rohmer
502 books124 followersAKA Arthur Sarsfield Ward (real name); Michael Furey.
Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward (15 February 1883 - 1 June 1959), better known as Sax Rohmer, was a prolific English novelist. He is best remembered for his series of novels featuring the master criminal Dr. Fu Manchu.
Born in Birmingham to a working class family, Rohmer initially pursued a career as a civil servant before concentrating on writing full-time.
He worked as a poet, songwriter, and comedy sketch writer in Music Hall before creating the Sax Rohmer persona and pursuing a career writing weird fiction.
Like his contemporaries Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, Rohmer claimed membership to one of the factions of the qabbalistic Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Rohmer also claimed ties to the Rosicrucians, but the validity of his claims has been questioned. His physician and family friend, Dr. R. Watson Councell may have been his only legitimate connection to such organizations. It is believed that Rohmer may have exaggerated his association in order to boost his literary reputation as an occult writer.
His first published work came in 1903, when the short story The Mysterious Mummy was sold to Pearson's Weekly. He gradually transitioned from writing for Music Hall performers to concentrating on short stories and serials for magazine publication. In 1909 he married Rose Elizabeth Knox.
He published his first novel Pause! anonymously in 1910. After penning Little Tich in 1911 (as ghostwriter for the Music Hall entertainer) he issued the first Fu Manchu novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, was serialized from October 1912 - June 1913. It was an immediate success with its fast-paced story of Denis Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie facing the worldwide conspiracy of the 'Yellow Peril'. The Fu Manchu stories, together with his more conventional detective series characters—Paul Harley, Gaston Max, Red Kerry, Morris Klaw, and The Crime Magnet—made Rohmer one of the most successful and well-paid authors of the 1920s and 1930s.
Rohmer also wrote several novels of supernatural horror, including Brood of the Witch-Queen. Rohmer was very poor at managing his wealth, however, and made several disastrous business decisions that hampered him throughout his career. His final success came with a series of novels featuring a female variation on Fu Manchu, Sumuru.
After World War II, the Rohmers moved to New York only returning to London shortly before his death. Rohmer died in 1959 due to an outbreak of influenza ("Asian Flu").
There were thirteen books in the Fu Manchu series in all (not counting the posthumous The Wrath of Fu Manchu. The Sumuru series consist of five books.
His wife published her own mystery novel, Bianca in Black in 1954 under the pen name, Elizabeth Sax Rohmer. Some editions of the book mistakenly credit her as Rohmer's daughter. Elizabeth Sax Rohmer and Cay Van Ash, her husband's former assistant, wrote a biography of the author, Master of Villainy, published in 1972.
Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward (15 February 1883 - 1 June 1959), better known as Sax Rohmer, was a prolific English novelist. He is best remembered for his series of novels featuring the master criminal Dr. Fu Manchu.
Born in Birmingham to a working class family, Rohmer initially pursued a career as a civil servant before concentrating on writing full-time.
He worked as a poet, songwriter, and comedy sketch writer in Music Hall before creating the Sax Rohmer persona and pursuing a career writing weird fiction.
Like his contemporaries Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, Rohmer claimed membership to one of the factions of the qabbalistic Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Rohmer also claimed ties to the Rosicrucians, but the validity of his claims has been questioned. His physician and family friend, Dr. R. Watson Councell may have been his only legitimate connection to such organizations. It is believed that Rohmer may have exaggerated his association in order to boost his literary reputation as an occult writer.
His first published work came in 1903, when the short story The Mysterious Mummy was sold to Pearson's Weekly. He gradually transitioned from writing for Music Hall performers to concentrating on short stories and serials for magazine publication. In 1909 he married Rose Elizabeth Knox.
He published his first novel Pause! anonymously in 1910. After penning Little Tich in 1911 (as ghostwriter for the Music Hall entertainer) he issued the first Fu Manchu novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, was serialized from October 1912 - June 1913. It was an immediate success with its fast-paced story of Denis Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie facing the worldwide conspiracy of the 'Yellow Peril'. The Fu Manchu stories, together with his more conventional detective series characters—Paul Harley, Gaston Max, Red Kerry, Morris Klaw, and The Crime Magnet—made Rohmer one of the most successful and well-paid authors of the 1920s and 1930s.
Rohmer also wrote several novels of supernatural horror, including Brood of the Witch-Queen. Rohmer was very poor at managing his wealth, however, and made several disastrous business decisions that hampered him throughout his career. His final success came with a series of novels featuring a female variation on Fu Manchu, Sumuru.
After World War II, the Rohmers moved to New York only returning to London shortly before his death. Rohmer died in 1959 due to an outbreak of influenza ("Asian Flu").
There were thirteen books in the Fu Manchu series in all (not counting the posthumous The Wrath of Fu Manchu. The Sumuru series consist of five books.
His wife published her own mystery novel, Bianca in Black in 1954 under the pen name, Elizabeth Sax Rohmer. Some editions of the book mistakenly credit her as Rohmer's daughter. Elizabeth Sax Rohmer and Cay Van Ash, her husband's former assistant, wrote a biography of the author, Master of Villainy, published in 1972.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 4, 2022
This is a bakers' dozen stories collected from early in Sax Rohmer's career, many of them written under his original name Arthur Sarsfield Ward. I'd encountered a couple of them before (The Secret of Holm Peel, for example, was the title story of an Ace collection I read a few years ago), but most of them were new to me, and I didn't know Rohmer had such a wide range. The stories were originally published from 1903-1922, most of them prior to WWI, most in popular British entertainment magazines of the time such as Pearson's, Cassell's, London, etc. Rohmer was a fine adventure writer, but the works all have the racial, ethnic, and gender biases and stereotypes common at the time. Rohmer is best known as the creator of Dr. Fu Manchu, genius villain who led and embodied the "Yellow Peril" in dozens of best-selling novels and films for decades. This book includes the first Fu Manchu story, The Zayat Kiss (in which the Doctor does not appear, curiously, though his daughter does), and introduces the good guys, his nemesis, Denis Nayland Smith and his Watson, Dr. Petrie. There's also an excerpt from the novel The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu which makes little sense out of context, and Smith appears but is not named in The Blue Monkey. Most of the other stories reflect the popularity of Doyle's Holmes stories and the fascination with the macabre in those early years of the century: the first story gives us arachnophobia on a boat, the second has arachnophobia on a train, the third has a mad Malay monkey, then a crazy guy at an ancient abbey, etc. The writing tends to be a little on the florid side by modern standards, but they're still fun. For example, The McVillin starts: "The sun was near to setting when Colonel Fergus McVillin found himself upon a wine-clad slope above a picturesque valley, wherein nestled a quaint little town blushing in the warm evening rays." It goes on that way for a long time as he hears church bells, walks over a bridge, and then remembers that he's hungry and broke. There are a few satiric stories about class, society, manners, and piracy to round things out. Rohmer was a big influence on American pulp writers and, though it's quite dated, I enjoyed reading the stories collected here.
March 6, 2014
Just the lead story read by John Rowe.
Meh!
November 18, 2020
Some early works of Sax Rohmer before he became Sax Rohmer. Gentlemen detectives, mysterious Eastern foreigners, gruff patrician nobility, and super smart criminals. All the elements of a basic Fu-Manchu novel separated into their constituent parts. There are old castles on islands off the coast, deep holes in the moor with carriages in the bottom, plus spiders, bugs, and a couple of monkeys. In the end we get them all put together in a Fu-Manchu story or two. Interesting to see Rohmer putting together his style before he finally makes the breakthrough to the big time.
May 1, 2014
If you go Amazon and look up a famous author whose books have fallen out of copyright you will find literally hundreds of editions of their books, these are mostly "print on demand" books which are printed by the likes of Amazon when they receive your order, why anyone would buy say one of the hundreds of print on demand editions of a famous book like Huckleberry Finn, when the book is available for for next to nothing in nice old copies or for free as a download I have no idea. However if you take an author, who was popular but not too popular like Sax Rohmer there is a case for using print on demand publishing, especially when you consider that he wrote quite a few stories for magazines, that are now out of copyright, and that you either can't find or would have to pay silly money for, which is what this volume consists of.
A few of the stories in the book have been published before in book-form in the UK but not in the USA, stories such as "The McVillin" in "Tales of East and West" and "The Secret of Holm Peel" and "The Blue Monkey" both in "The Secret of Holm Peel." Also, perhaps oddly, included are two Fu Manchu stories that are amongst Rohmer's best known pieces. This book shouldn't act as an introduction to Sax Rohmer, the reason many of the stories have never been collected before is because they don't represent him at his best, many of the stories are from the start of his career when he was just learning his trade, but for a Sax Rohmer aficionado, there will be a least some stories you haven't come across before.
A few of the stories in the book have been published before in book-form in the UK but not in the USA, stories such as "The McVillin" in "Tales of East and West" and "The Secret of Holm Peel" and "The Blue Monkey" both in "The Secret of Holm Peel." Also, perhaps oddly, included are two Fu Manchu stories that are amongst Rohmer's best known pieces. This book shouldn't act as an introduction to Sax Rohmer, the reason many of the stories have never been collected before is because they don't represent him at his best, many of the stories are from the start of his career when he was just learning his trade, but for a Sax Rohmer aficionado, there will be a least some stories you haven't come across before.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews