Tobias Cooper’s Reviews > Fu Manchu: The Insidious Dr Fu Manchu / The Return of Dr Fu Manchu / Hand of Fu Manchu > Status Update

One pleasure of reading books from the early part of the 20th Century, especially those dealing with "foreign parts", it's that the writers pepper their work with obscure words of foreign origin that expand the vocabulary! I have today discovered the word "kahn", from the Persian kân, meaning an inn or hotel

The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu is finished. The sinister doctor has disappeared in the flames of a burning building. Dr Petrie is heading up the Nile to visit his beloved Karamaneh and all is right with the world. But what's this on the next page we have The Devil Doctor or The Return of Doctor Fu-Manchu...

The picture that he presented at that moment is one which persistently clings in my memory. In his long, yellow robe, his masklike, intellectual face bent forward amongst the riot of singular objects upon the table, his great, high brow gleaming in the light of the shaded lamp above him, and with the abnormal eyes, filmed and green, raised to us, he seemed a figure from the realms of delirium.

Great fun

Poor Petrie, falling for the charms of Fu Manchu's agent.

It was a perfect summer's night, and the deep blue vault above was jewelled with myriads of starry points. How impossible it seemed to reconcile that vast, eternal calm with the hideous passions and fiendish agencies which that night had loosed a soul upon the infinite.

Reading the Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu (here under its U.S. title as the Insidious Fu Manchu). This book was published in 1913, and it shows, however Fu Manchu has always been a curious example of "yellow peril" fiction as although cruel and devious he is also highly intelligent and cultured (and in later books, although by no means on the side of the angels, a force for the greater good).