Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu

The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, first published in the UK as The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, is the first novel to introduce the inimitable Fu-Manchu, famous not just for his moustache, but for being a nigh-unstoppable criminal mastermind and part of the "e;Yellow Peril."e; This novel is a collection of previously published short stories, slightly re-written by Rohmer to form a cohesive whole.The narrator, Dr. Petrie, is a sort of Watson to Nayland Smith's Holmes; but Smith resembles more of a James Bond than a Sherlock Holmes as the two barrel through action scenes and near-death scenarios planned by Fu-Manchu, a master scientist, chemist, and poisoner.This novel was one of the first to popularize the trope of the "e;mysterious Chinaman,"e; an element that later became so cliched that Ronald Knox, the famous detective story writer, declared that "e;no Chinaman must figure"e; in good detective stories.The casual racism evident in the characters and events is a symptom of the xenophobic climate in the UK at the time, which was precipitated by many things-the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, Chinese immigration, and other fears. Despite that racism, the plot remains fast-paced and engaging, and is lent a modern air by Fu-Manchu's role as an early prototype for a Bond supervillain.A fast-paced Edwardian thriller that launched one of early pulp fiction's most enduring criminal masterminds.The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)