Changes

First things first – without having read any of the books or seen the films before, I’ve always been under the impression that Fu Manchu was a bit stereotypical. That’s completely wrong – Fu Manchu is incredibly, staggeringly, massively stereotypical. There are stout Englishmen who value their word above their life, an Oriental villain who must rank as one of the nastiest in literature, and a beautiful slave girl who falls almost immediately in love with the English doctor. There’s also a newspaper article that Petrie reads which suggests the practice of Chinese people buying poisonous scorpions to kill unwanted girl children is fairly common, and a scene in which Smith encourages Petrie to seize the slave girl ‘’by ''by the hair, drag her to some cellar, hurl her down, and stand over her with a whip’’ whip'' to get information out of her. If this is the kind of thing that will make your blood boil, I’d walk away from the book rather quickly if I were you…