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Dr Petrie is surprised, but pleased, to see his old friend Nayland Smith has returned to England. But this is no mere pleasure visit – the former Scotland Yard man is on the trail of Fu Manchu, a Chinese doctor with ''the brains of any three men of genius''. Petrie is immediately plunged into a headlong race against time to stop the mysterious villain from fulfilling his evil plans and leading the East to world domination!
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…
Right, with that out of the way, I take it we’re left with readers who are, like myself, happy to overlook the elements which seem seriously out of date if the story’s enjoyable enough? The good news is, if that’s the attitude you take, there’s a huge amount to like here. While I wouldn’t say Rohmer’s writing style was anything much to write home about – a couple of narrative jumps left me seriously confused and I’m not quite sure that was the intended effect – he has the virtue of producing massively exciting prose, and throwing action scene after action scene into the mix with dizzying effect. The first murder takes place on the fifth page, and if the death rate doesn’t quite stay that high all the way through, an incredibly violent ending more than makes up for it. Indeed, had I been reading this when it was originally published in serial form back in the 1910s, I would have been going crazy waiting for the next installment.

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