It has been a while since I have read the book series, and have decided to place all my old thoughts on these books in one place for the FanLit reader who may not be familiar with these works.
This overview, by no means in depth, can serve as your one-stop shopping destination for all things Fu. There remains one book, an anthology of short Fu Manchu stories, that I will deal with elsewhere. But here are the 13 novels in the main series, and my quick thoughts on each of them:.
The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu aka The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu In it, Commissioner Nayland Smith and his cohort, Dr. Petrie, travel around London trying to rescue various chaps from murder, kidnapping, memory loss and assorted attacks perpetrated by the evil Chinese mastermind, Dr. Fu Manchu. The pace of the book is quite breathless, and before all is said and done, we have dealt with poisonous centipedes, opium dens, trapdoors, memory drugs, mummies, poison gas, thugees and dacoits, ship raids, hashish, zombies, poison mushrooms, swamp adder drugs and on and on.
Like I said, Rohmer throws a lot into this one, all for the pleasure of the adventure-loving reader. This is a ripper of a yarn, as they used to say, and a nice intro to the other books in the Fu Manchu series. The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu aka The Devil Doctor This is the second of the Fu Manchu books that Sax Rohmer gave us.
Like the first, it is very episodic in nature, revealing its origin as a series of short magazine stories. A reading of the previous book WOULD be helpful for a full enjoyment of this volume, but is not absolutely necessary. Like the first book, this one is jam-packed with fast-moving action and bizarre adventure.
