Description:“He had a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan. Something serpentine, hypnotic, was in his very presence. Smith drew one sharp breath and was silent. Together, chained to the wall, two medieval captives, living captives of our boasted modern security, we crouched before Dr Fu Manchu.
He came forward with an indescribable gait, catlike, yet awkward, never turning away the reptilian gaze of those eyes that must haunt my dreams forever. ‘Mr Smith, your interference with my plans has gone far enough… “
Now personally, I can’t read this without hearing the voice of the fiendish Chu En Ginsberg, played by Kenneth Williams. “Ah, Mr Horne, we meet again!” “Ah, Chu!” “Bless You”. But Kenneth Horne (a Birmingham man, incidentally) could only get away with his wicked parody because everyone knew the original. Fu Manchu, the evil but brilliant Chinese doctor, was the archetypal villain of the first half of the 20th Century. Centuries of inscrutability behind him and with the modest ambition of wanting to rule the world, his reptilian green eyes stared out from the coves of a legion of books and a dozen films. And his creator was a brummie.
Arthur Henry Ward was born at 28 Rann Street in Ladywood, the son of Irish immigrants, in 1883. This was not information that you would get from the author himself. Ward believed in later life that aging was all in the mind. If you didn’t know how old you were, then you didn’t feel that old. So he forgot all about his early years.
Not that he’d have remembered Birmingham much anyway – his parents moved to London when he was two or three. A strange child he was, a very strange child. His mother was an alcoholic, his father was a workaholic, and Arthur himself was a sleepwalker. On one occasion his father found Arthur trying to strangle him in the night. There were dark pools in that child’s brain that would grow and deepen as the years went by.
But Arthur Henry Ward is not the name we associate with Fu Manchu. When ward returned from a trip to Europe in 1905, to cure a bad case of writer’s block – he had become Sax Rohmer. It was a name with a mysterious foreign feel to it, appropriate for someone whose books were filled with mysterious foreigners.
Sax Rohmer began his literary career with a few short stories and sketches for the comedian George Robey. He was a ghostwriter too, again highly appropriate for a man who believed intensely in ghosts. In fact, he and his wife had a ghost as a lodger in their house in Mayfair. Rohmer’s life was full of strange occult experiences, phantom dogs, cat goddesses, lodgers who weren’t there. In 1909 he and his wife sat down for a spell on the Ouija Board.
“How,” he asked the spirit, “can I best make a living?” The answer came back C-H-I-N-A-M-A-N. And so it turned out. Rohmer was something of a roamer by nature. And his nocturnal wanderings in London’s Chinatown in search of inspiration unearthed a larger than life character, a drug dealer and businessman known as “Mr King”. Two years later in 1913, the tall Chinese man Rohmer had once seen getting out of a limousine in Limehouse was reborn as Dr Fu Manchu. From jobbing writer, Rohmer was a famous author almost overnight. The Devil Doctor had struck a chord. He was the ‘Yellow Peril’ incarnate, and expert in all those Chinese drugs and poisons and Eastern magic that the West was most uneasy about. How the Chinese themselves felt about their new cultural representative was another matter. During the first world war, when china was an ally, old Fu was conveniently forgotten.