Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Three – “The Clue of the Pigtail”

“The Clue of the Pigtail” was the second installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial, Fu-Manchu. It was first published in The Story-Teller in November 1912. It would later comprise Chapters 4-6 of the novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu [US title: The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu] published the following year. Rohmer makes a drastic switch from the weird menace of “The Zayat Kiss” to a more traditional Yellow Peril storyline. The influence of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries is much less pronounced the second time around. This episode and the one that immediately follows it (“Redmoat” which we will examine in greater detail next week) see Rohmer instead delve deeper into the background of his Yellow Peril mystery. This transition is a necessary one to provide Dr. Fu-Manchu with a plausible motive for the weird deaths he was directing against his political enemies in the first story.

Most critics cite the Boxer Uprising of 1900 as the beginning of Yellow Peril fiction. While that inaugural international conflict of the 20th Century certainly did much to incite reader interest, Yellow Peril stories had existed prior to the series of massacres of Western missionaries that would ultimately spell the end of the Manchu Dynasty and be responsible for much of the ideological and socio-political transformation of the globe in the last century. A brief overview of the most prominent Yellow Peril stories prior to Sax Rohmer’s introduction of Dr. Fu-Manchu may prove beneficial.

Robert W. Chambers’ 1896 story, “The Maker of Moons” turned Yue-Laou (Chinese folklore’s Man in the Moon who watches over lovers fated to be together) into a villainous sorcerer, leader of the secret society, the Kuen-Yuin. Yue-Laou became the first Yellow Peril villain to make an impact on Western readers. Interestingly, Chambers’ interpretation of Yue-Laou is not only ignorant of Chinese culture in its misrepresentation of their folklore, but also in its portrayal of Chinese people. As Yellow Peril fiction took root and began to thrive, it did so on the fear that Asians posed a threat unique among non-Christian peoples in that they could not be condescended to as aboriginal people from undeveloped cultures for they possessed knowledge, skills, habits, language, and customs foreign to the imperialist nations of the West who were at once in awe and intimidated by the same.

The role prophetic fiction played in the development of the Yellow Peril sub-genre is nearly forgotten today. M. P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1898) and The Yellow Wave (1906) and Vladimir Solovyov’s “A Short History of the Anti-Christ” (despite the title, most assuredly a Yellow Peril story in the truest sense) are just a few excellent examples of how the threat of Eastern nations uniting to overwhelm the West seemed as if it could have been ripped from newspaper headlines of the day. By the time of the Boxer Uprising, Shiel and Solovyov seemed positively prescient. Rohmer himself would ultimately mine this same territory, albeit many years later and with a decidedly Middle Eastern flavor, in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932).

Albert Dorrington’s Yellow Peril thriller, The Radium Terrors (1910) with the fiendish, but brilliant Dr. Tsarka with his seductive daughter by his side provides as essential a link to Dr. Fu-Manchu (and, by extension, Alex Raymond’s Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon) as Guy Boothby’s Dr. Nikola and Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty. The gleaming omission from this survey of literary influences and the one most commonly associated with Dr. Fu-Manchu is Hanoi Shan. Purported to be a Chinese criminal mastermind who controlled the Apache street gangs in Paris in the first decade of the last century, the truth of the matter is that criminologist H. Ashton Wolfe who chronicled Hanoi Shan’s exploits in three short stories (“The Suicide Room” and “The Scented Death” appeared in Warped in the Making: Crimes of Love and Hate (1927) and “Kiki: A Tale of Hanoi Shan, the Spider” appeared in 1930’s The Thrill of Evil) was likely more influenced by Sax Rohmer’s fiction than the reverse. Rohmer’s insistence that Dr. Fu-Manchu had a real-life counterpart (who not coincidentally shared the name of Mr. King with the villains of two of Rohmer’s non-series novels, The Yellow Claw (1915) and 1932’s Yu’an Hee-See Laughs) is likely more an example of Rohmer penchant for storytelling than it is reflective of reality. The many variations in Rohmer’s first person accounts over the years of this alleged real-life brush with a Chinese crime lord are proof of this if nothing else.

“The Clue of the Pigtail” is an entertaining yarn and certainly a cut above traditional Limehouse stories thanks to Rohmer’s skills as a writer. Rohmer closely adheres to the formula from “The Zayat Kiss” in opening with a domestic scene of Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie reading the evening paper when a call from Inspector Weymouth pulls them out of the normal and into the outré. A series of bizarre deaths in London’s Limehouse district leave a series of corpses with missing fingers. One of the Chinese victims turns out to be Cadby, an undercover Scotland Yard man. It is Cadby’s tragedy that sets the action in motion. Smith and Petrie pay a visit to Shen-Yan’s barber shop – a front for an opium den, of course disguised as Cockney sailors with a taste for the poppy. Shen-Yan’s is straight out of De Quincey’s fanciful Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (a classic work from 1821 that Rohmer will draw more heavily upon for his aforementioned novel, The Yellow Claw written two years later).

Rohmer’s depiction of Limehouse succeeds so masterfully because of the transition from clichéd Chinese speaking Pidgin English to our first glimpse of Dr. Fu-Manchu in all his glory. It is essential that Rohmer adhere to form in presenting the first Chinese in the story as stereotypical characters with little command of English language and customs that are only too willing to accept bullying and abuse (provided their clients’ money is good) before presenting us with Dr. Fu-Manchu. Instantly the reader knows that Smith and Petrie are outclassed. The Devil Doctor is more intelligent and cunning than they could ever hope to be. His age and physical infirmity in contrast with the heroes’ youth and relative inexperience make him an even more intimidating opponent. Rohmer continues the tradition he started in “The Zayat Kiss” by making Smith and Petrie’s survival dependent upon the willingness of Fu-Manchu’s servant to betray her master for her love of Dr. Petrie. Karamaneh is still nameless in this second adventure, but Rohmer goes to pains to make it as clear as possible given the strictures of his day, the nature of her relationship with poor unfortunate Cadby. The disapproval of the Scotland Yard man’s motherly landlady tells the reader all they need to know. The girl who loves Petrie, the girl the dull suburban doctor is quickly becoming infatuated with, the girl Nayland Smith sets free despite the knowledge of her crimes, is no English rose. Karamaneh is an exciting, exotic girl from the East. She is not free, but she offers the promise of pleasures that Petrie, like Rohmer and his readers cannot possibly resist. Karamaneh, like her master, repulses and attracts the reader in equal measure and soon the balance is tipped so that one merely wishes for Smith and Petrie to cheat death, but never end the threat of Fu-Manchu. The prospect of a world without these enticing, diverting foreign “devils” is one scarcely worth considering.

Robert E. Howard, Exile of Cross Plains

The transformation of literary genres in the early twentieth century was marked by a series of intriguing parallels and recurrences. When Raymond Chandler, displaced as much in England as California, started down the mean streets of writing pulp fiction, he used an Erle Stanley Gardner story as his template. Chandler prepared a detailed synopsis of Gardner’s story and then re-wrote the story himself, comparing the results to the original. Chandler’s first published pulp story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” (1933) introduced the prototype for the hardboiled private eye who emerged six years later in Chandler’s landmark first novel, The Big Sleep in the form of Philip Marlowe. Likewise Chandler’s literary heir, Ross Macdonald, displaced as much in Canada as California, would use The Big Sleep as the template for his own first novel, The Moving Target (1949) and, in the process, introduced Marlowe’s successor, Lew Archer who would arguably represent the hardboiled detective realized to its full potential.
When Robert E. Howard, an outcast in his native Cross Plains, started down the path that would eventually give the world the genre now known as Sword & Sorcery, he used Paul L. Anderson’s story, “En-ro of the Ta-an” as the template for his various “Am-ra of the Ta-an” story drafts. Anderson would likely be a completely forgotten literary figure but for the efforts of Howard scholar, Rusty Burke. Even without Anderson as a reference point, Howard’s first attempts at creating a noble savage are instantly familiar to the modern reader as being works that are highly derivative of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, Pellucidar and Caspak novels. Just as the seminal Black Mask writers took the western and successfully brought it to an urban setting creating modern detective fiction in the process, so Burroughs and those he influenced took Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli tales and laid the foundation for modern myth-making by cross-breeding jungle adventures with the lost worlds tales of Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. Rider Haggard.

Howard’s early efforts with Am-ra distinguish themselves from mere imitation by their vivid and, at times, poetic descriptions of primitive life in all its terrible beauty. The Ta-an fragments culminate in the posthumously published story, “Exile of Atlantis” in which Am-ra is supplanted by Kull, originally conceived as a supporting character. This subconscious usurping of the central role is foreshadowed by the introduction of the character of Gaur who dogs Am-ra’s footsteps in an early formation of the storyline as an epic poem. Just as Howard’s Am-ra followed Anderson’s En-ro so Gaur (as Kull) was destined to overtake Am-ra. Perhaps in recognition of this transference, Howard would contrive for Kull to usurp the throne of Valusia. More significantly, Howard later rewrote the Kull story, “By This Axe I Rule!” as “The Phoenix on the Sword.” It is this rewritten version that introduces the character who will successfully establish the new fantasy sub-genre as Conan usurps the throne of Aquilonia and fills Kull’s sandals (and thereby fulfills Kull’s promise) as the noble savage turned king.

The parallels do not begin and end with usurpers in these early works, there is also Howard’s recurring theme of mercy killings. By far the most vivid scene in “Exile of Atlantis” is the climactic moment that decides Kull’s fate. He spies a nubile young woman being prepared for execution for marrying outside her tribe. Knowing he cannot save her life and wishing to spare her a more painful death, Kull hurls a dagger through her heart in an act of mercy that the victim herself welcomes. This act seals Kull’s fate and makes him an outcast among his own people. Interestingly, it is Am-ra who now follows Kull’s example just as Kull’s predecessor, Gaur once followed Am-ra’s example in the early Ta-an fragments. A similar action on the part of the hero can be found in the early Conan story, “The Tower of the Elephant” where Conan will likewise mercifully take the life of Yag-kosha, the elephant man to release him from his unending misery. This recurring theme of mercy killing is one that Howard himself would embrace when he ended his own life in the face of his mother’s death.

Howard’s suicide seems inevitable in light of the world-view contained in his stories. His fiction, like Chandler and Macdonald, is the work of the eternal outsider. The tragedy in Howard’s case is that his exile was only temporal and not physical. Had he left Cross Plains behind as his idealized selves, Kull and Conan had done with Atlantis and Cimmeria, he might have recognized that the unbearable loss of his mother would heal by gradations and unlike the nameless victim of small-minded prejudice in “Exile of Atlantis” or poor crippled Yag-kosha trapped in a cruel, unforgiving world in “The Tower of the Elephant,” Howard could and should have escaped the pain of his childhood home and learned to live a richer, fuller life where his gift for depicting the world in all its splendor and wanton savagery might have given him the peace and acceptance that he hungered for, but was denied in the twelve short years he gave himself as a writer. Clinical depression and creativity often walk the same path. Howard’s talent outlived him, but his own hour of the dragon concluded not with a noble mercy killing, but rather a tired resignation from one who fought a solitary war against a world he feared to conquer.

Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer – Part Two: “The Zayat Kiss”

It has often been noted that Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie are cut from the same cloth as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and yet they display as many differences as they do similarities to their more famous progenitors. When Sax Rohmer incorporated “The Zayat Kiss” into the first three chapters of his first novel, British readers had a distinct advantage over their American counterparts in that the UK edition, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu contains chapter titles that The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu is lacking. The first chapter is titled, in a direct reference to the opening chapter of the first Holmes novel, “Mr. Nayland Smith of Burma.”

Yet it is not Nayland Smith who conjures the most indelible image of Sherlock Holmes so much as it is the brilliant, but eccentric criminal pathologist, Chalmers Cleeve who we meet as he crawls beetle-like about the crime scene. Cleeve is stumped by the murder of Sir Crichton Davey as much as Scotland Yard’s Inspector Weymouth (who Smith and Petrie meet for the first time in this tale) for it requires more than deductive reasoning to successfully combat Dr. Fu-Manchu. The Devil Doctor can only be matched by an opponent destined to defeat him. Fate, in its distinctly Eastern concept, is the deciding factor in restoring order to the frenzied paranoiac world that Rohmer vividly creates for his readers in sharp contrast with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s prevailing belief that trained reasoning can solve any problem.

Dr. Petrie, our Watsonian narrator, is also an aspiring author like Conan Doyle’s prototype. The difference is that Petrie is not a heroic war veteran like Watson, but an Everyman never even granted a first name in any of Rohmer’s stories. Petrie is a dull, drab physician with an ailing suburban medical practice and an ambition to write weird mystery stories. Unlike Holmes and Watson who are introduced by way of a mutual friend aware that both men are looking for someone to share lodgings with, Nayland Smith is established at the outset an old friend of Petrie’s, a civil servant unexpectedly returned from Burma.

The back-story that Rohmer establishes for Smith is that he stumbled upon the existence of an Eastern secret society sworn to stem the tide of British colonialism. Smith was shot with an arrow dipped in the poison of a hamadryad. He suffered for days in a malaria-infested jungle and survived only by his own ingenuity and fortitude in affecting his own painful cure. The wound he shows Petrie on his arm is clearly inspired by Watson’s war wound in Afghanistan, yet given a more lurid and melodramatic origin and story purpose. Watson’s injury is used to demonstrate Holmes’ intellectual and physical superiority whereas Smith’s injury is the threat of strange deaths that Petrie (and by extension, the reader) will face as they leave the safe, comfortable world of the writer’s study and enter the crazed secret war being fought under cover of darkness.

It is interesting to note that Smith intended his stay in England to be a brief one. He specifically asks Petrie to put him up and serve as his constant companion for a few days at most. In return, he promises to give Petrie plenty of material to jump-start his career as a writer of weird fiction. Smith’s intent is that only Petrie knows that he is in England. All of this changes once Smith learns that he is too late to save Sir Crichton Davey from assassination. Petrie, the innocent bystander, is now involved and there is precious little to be done save to persevere for to turn back now would surely mean the end of his life. Dr. Fu-Manchu is determined to limit the number of people who know of his existence and the threat posed by the secret society he serves.

Sir Crichton Davey is the third of Fu-Manchu’s victims of assassination since coming to Europe. Nayland Smith tells Petrie of the fates shared by Jules Furneaux and the Grand Duke Stanislaus. All three victims would appear to have died of natural causes. Smith literally describes himself to Petrie as the West’s only hope for survival against their mysterious unseen Eastern foes and Rohmer sets out to make such a hysterical claim seem credible over the course of the story.

Rohmer’s chief means of successfully creating this atmosphere is by making the first victim of Dr. Fu-Manchu unprepossessing. Sir Crichton Davey is a cocaine addict, not a bored dilettante like Holmes, but a cad as underlined by his womanizing as much as his drug addiction. The description of Davey’s study matches Rohmer’s own study where he wrote his stories with its green-shaded writing lamp and Oriental curios. The clues at the crime scene — a perfumed envelope and what appears to be lipstick stains on the back of the corpse’s hand – are as much a sign of the womanizing bachelor as it is a sign of the first of Fu-Manchu’s strange deaths.

At the time of his murder, Sir Crichton was engaged in writing a book on the secrets of Tibet. Time and again, Rohmer’s British characters display an odd fascination with the East which imperils their lives. On a larger level, Rohmer the Edwardian author was generating an interest in the East in the minds of his British and American readers by sharing his own real-life obsessions by way of his fiction. Britain is portrayed as ordinary and staid in contrast to the mysterious East with its promise of intrigue, excitement, danger, and sex – in other words, everything foreign to Edwardian Britain.

Apart from the bizarre murder weapon of the title, “The Zayat Kiss” chiefly portrays the East through the person of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the criminal genius operating behind the scenes who never actually appears in the story and whom Nayland Smith has only glimpsed in passing (as Rohmer will later claim was the case with his real-life counterpart, Mr. King). It is interesting to note that Smith’s description of Fu-Manchu with his “brow like Shakespeare” and “face like Satan” mark a study in contrasts. He is both a figure to admire and repulse the reader in equal parts. Most notably, Smith views him not as his equal (as Holmes does with his mentor turned enemy, Professor Moriarty), but as his better. Rohmer will never abandon this duality as he develops the character, but will continue to strive to entice and revolt his reader in equal measure. More than the embodiment of the Yellow Peril, Fu-Manchu is the British colonialist’s embodiment of Foreign Other – at once both enticing and fearful.

The other chief portrayal of the East in the story comes in the form of Fu-Manchu’s unnamed slave girl. The character will gain a name and personality in later stories and it is noteworthy that even at this early stage, Rohmer was considering giving Fu-Manchu a daughter. The beautiful slave girl of the East is both a figure of fantasy from 1001 Arabian Nights and a reminder of the real-life treatment of women in some Eastern cultures. While this is only hinted at in “The Zayat Kiss,” Rohmer will develop this theme to greater effect in later stories. Exotic Eastern women promise pleasures and beauty their Western counterparts cannot hope to measure against, but they also function as damsels in distress to be liberated from their “savage” captors and brought to the safety of the West. Of course, as we shall see in due course, nothing with Rohmer is ever quite that simple. While Petrie will win the heart and freedom of his Egyptian slave girl, it is he who will convert to her way of life – choosing to live with her in Cairo rather than remain in England. Rohmer’s own heart, as always, belonged to the East.

Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer – Part One: “The Zayat Kiss”

Arthur Henry Ward was born in England in 1883. His father hoped his son would make his way through life as a respectable businessman, but young Arthur was determined to make a name for himself as an author. He discovered immortality with the invention of two unlikely monikers that conjured an air of exotic intrigue when they debuted in print a century ago. The first was his chosen pen name, Sax Rohmer and the second was the name of the character at the heart of his first published novel, Dr. Fu-Manchu.

Over the years, the name lost its hyphen and became synonymous with the moustache artists and actors always depicted the character as wearing despite the fact that he was always described in print as clean-shaven. Dr. Fu-Manchu is a brilliant and honourable scientist who is opposed to British colonial interference in the East. Using a variety of fiendish inventions, insects, and assassins, he sets out to remove Western influence and silence those who know too much about the East. Most intriguing in our post-9/11 world, the Devil Doctor chooses to fight his battles not in China, but on British soil using terror as his weapon. He is opposed in his efforts by stalwart British colonialist Nayland Smith and Smith’s bodyguard and Fu-Manchu’s biographer, Dr. Petrie. Rohmer’s stories spanned five decades moving in real time with his characters aging alongside their author. For much of the first half of the last century, Dr. Fu-Manchu was the villain readers loved to hate.

Born out of imperialist Britain’s fear of a Yellow Peril emerging from the East, Rohmer ingeniously imbued his fictional villain with greater intelligence and integrity than his Western protagonists. Dr. Fu-Manchu was introduced in October 1912 in the pages of “The Zayat Kiss,” a thrilling tale borrowing heavily from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Speckled Band” complete with the Holmesian duo of Burmese Police Commissioner Nayland Smith and his loyal friend and assistant, Dr. Petrie. Readers of Britain’s The Story-Teller were delighted with the results and the story became the first of a collection its author titled simply, Fu-Manchu.

The unflappable duo of Smith and Petrie repeatedly strive to save Men Who Know Too Much about China from assassination at the hands of Dr. Fu-Manchu’s dacoit servants or the various poisonous reptiles, insects, and biological agents at his disposal. These colourful intended victims begin with cocaine-addicted Sir Crichton Davey who dies with a mysterious imprint of a woman’s lips on the back of his hand mumbling the words, “the red hand” in his delirium.

The title of the collection was amended to The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu when it was published in book form by Cassell in June 1913 while American publisher, McBride & Nast preferred The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu as a variant title for its US publication in October of that same year. Whatever the title, the storied collection was a smashing success and readers clamoured for more. For a time, Sax Rohmer was quite happy to deliver.

Fu-Manchu’s foremost literary antecedents were Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis, Professor Moriarty and Guy Boothby’s now forgotten criminal mastermind, Dr. Nikola (inspired, in no small part, by Aleister Crowley). Rohmer’s initial description of the character in “The Zayat Kiss” is unforgettable and one that Rohmer would strive to re-create over the years without ever falling into direct imitation:

‘Imagine a person, tall, lean, and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true-cat green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government – which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”

Dr. Fu-Manchu does not even make a physical appearance in the story, yet his presence pervades the atmosphere and hysteria of “The Zayat Kiss” from the first moment when Burmese Police Commissioner Nayland Smith turns up unannounced and unexpected at the residence of his childhood friend, Dr. Petrie – a staid suburban medical practitioner with aspirations to write weird fiction – and leads him into a mad world filled with conspiracy theories, bizarre assassinations, and a lovesick half-caste Egyptian slave girl who forms an immediate attachment on Petrie and ends up saving his and, by association, Nayland Smith’s life for the first of many times in this story. There was no way the story could not have been a smashing success when it debuted in print in October 1912. All of the ingredients were there to build a winning formula. How Rohmer did just that without growing tired and repetitious will be the subject of future instalments in this blog.

DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS, THE OBSESSIVE BIOGRAPHER MUST GO

Literary biographies are a peculiar form of torture. I suppose their purpose is to see if the reader is still capable of mustering the same affection for the author’s work after reveling in every personal flaw the biographer was able to uncover. Biographies are the ultimate way of evening the score with those whose talent we will never equal. They reassure us that the gifted individuals who gained immortality through their work were certainly no better and frequently even worse human beings than those of us who admire them. Thanks to literary biographies, many view the father of sword & sorcery as a clinically depressed mama’s boy angry at the world and the father of hardboiled fiction as…well, let’s face it…there was nothing you could ever say about Hammett he didn’t already tell you about himself. The latest literary biography to pass through my home was Judith Freeman’s recently published biography of Raymond Chandler, THE LONG EMBRACE.
I would not say that the book is unworthy of attention. Judith Freeman is an exceptional writer. She traces Chandler’s footsteps (even though it has been more than half a century since his death) by visiting every place he lived, worked, and vacationed and describes what she finds in a voice that Chandler fans will frequently recognize. It is a voice that is as evocative of Chandler’s work as the book’s title. The trouble is that Freeman isn’t writing a new Philip Marlowe mystery so much as transposing herself in Chandler’s shoes as a fellow author and kindred spirit. As the book unravels, she comes to share Chandler’s devotion to his wife and muse of over thirty years. The result is a bit like watching Otto Preminger’s classic film noir LAURA in that THE LONG EMBRACE shifts its focus and unfolds into a growing love story between a living person and a dead woman the narrator never met. Some readers will find the result enchanting, others will find it creepy.

As a rule, literary biographies tend to take a sensationalistic view of their subject’s sex lives. The Long Embrace spends a lengthy chapter arguing that Chandler may have been a closeted homosexual based on speculation from a former friend and an acquaintance of the late author. Freeman weighs the pros and cons to this longstanding theory with cleverly-selected passages from Chandler’s fiction that seem to support both sides of the argument only to conclude weakly with the dismissive suggestion that we should just mind our own business. This is unfortunate because it reduces the book to the level of a salacious celebrity bio. I would have preferred that Freeman had reached a conclusion and argued that the author’s work is better understood as a result of better understanding the man. Instead the entire section reads like a literary equivalent of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

I’ve read numerous Chandler biographies and despite Freeman taking the trouble to visit the actual locations, she uncovers nothing new. It comes as no surprise to the reader that the current occupants of the homes have either never met or never heard of Raymond Chandler, but Freeman keeps searching for clues even though she’s several decades too late. No one beats her up along the way, although she gives her subject a few good jabs and bruises. She is seduced by a femme fatale, but it’s only her subject’s dead wife and sadly she is denied the satisfaction of even a fade to black.

The truth is that Raymond Chandler was an intensely private man. His marriage and his personal life remain beyond the reach of anyone who isn’t interested in speculating without the benefit of facts. His work survives because of its excellence in spite of the fact that the author was a curmudgeon and might have been a hypocritical philanderer or a closet queen or maybe he really was what he always claimed to be — a man who didn’t give a damn about anyone except his wife. After her death, he destroyed her letters and most of her photos. His fame guaranteed they would sniff around and sully his reputation as best they could and there was nothing he could do to stop it, but Chandler made sure that he took every last vestige of his marriage with him to the grave. The more biographers dig for the weaknesses in these men who gave the world tough fiction, the more you realize it wasn’t the toughness that set their fiction apart so much as the honor and dignity they upheld. That’s something few biographies will ever replicate. “No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.”

SAM SPADE AND THE PURSUIT OF EMPTY DREAMS

SAM SPADE AND THE PURSUIT OF EMPTY DREAMS

Much of what has been written about Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon focuses on the novel as groundbreaking in its realistic portrayal of detective work. More in-depth literary studies tend to focus on the significance of Hammett’s shift in protagonist from the incorruptible and nameless Continental Op of his earlier work to the jaded self-portrait of the author as Sam Spade. In my view, this transition is primarily noteworthy in that Hammett’s protagonist changed from an idealized conception of the man he might have become had he remained a Pinkerton Operative (the Continental Op is based on Hammett’s boss during his stint with the Pinkerton Agency) to a more self-reflective portrayal of a man mired in moral conflict. Hammett’s own moral crisis would color his fiction from this point until he resolved his dilemma and settled into a life alternating his celebrity status with reclusiveness - a life whose one constant was Hammett’s complete lack of creative output for remaining 27 years.

Many have speculated why Hammett’s creativity dried up when he and his muse and mistress Lillian Hellman had settled comfortably into something approaching unwedded bliss as the Nick and Nora Charles of the real world. My own opinion has been that once freed of the conflict of whether or not to walk a path of integrity or give in to the encroaching corruption that constantly assailed his world, Hammett had nothing further to draw upon for inspiration. Resolution was tantamount to becoming a spent force and Hammett was finished as a writer. The fact that he realized this fact was inescapable lies at the heart of both The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key in their pursuit of empty dreams incapable of satisfying the characters whose lust is so great they are willing to die for or kill in their futile quests.

Hammett’s characters are marked as slaves of their appetites by their very names from Casper Gutman, the silver-tongued Fat Man of The Maltese Falcon to the murder victim who leant his moniker to The Thin Man. Hammett’s Fat Men and Thin Men are doomed by insatiable appetites for the empty objects of their desire. Whether starved or bloated, their hunger for that which will never grant them the sustenance they seek is unending and proves to be their undoing. The Maltese Falcon’s prized Black Bird with its mythological history is nothing but a worthless forgery beneath its shiny exterior. Those who have pursued the bird and have not forfeited their lives or liberty in its pursuit by the book’s conclusion do not learn from their folly, but simply continue to follow the next false trail.

What of Sam Spade and his moral dilemma? Surely, the detective protagonist is above such base temptations? While Spade is embroiled with those who seek the Black Bird, his own conflict is dealing with the murder of his partner, Miles Archer and dealing with Archer’s wife, Iva. Spade has been sleeping with her behind Archer’s back and she expects Sam to make an honest woman of her now that her husband is no longer around to stand between them. What most literary critics miss in focusing on the gritty realism of Hammett’s story is that Iva Archer represents Spade’s own Black Bird, his empty object of desire that threatens to be his undoing. The novel begins and ends with Sam and Iva. There is no mistake that the book’s opening description of Spade as a blond Satan (Hammett is describing himself at the time of the book’s writing) and the story concludes with Spade finally ready to face Iva and make the decision that will determine his fate for better or worse. That Hammett keeps Spade’s ultimate choice outside the story’s parameters is essential to a book built on moral dilemmas.

It is the role of the detective in mystery fiction to identify the root cause of the chaos that has set the story in motion and to restore order to an unjust world. The police in hardboiled fiction are stereotyped as corrupt or stupid (and frequently both), so the best hope for the few honest victims out there lies in the form of the private detective who eschews the organizational corruption of both City Hall and the Mob and chooses instead to live hand-to-mouth from one client to the next. This is how Hammett the union-buster for the Pinkerton Agency is the same Hammett who did a prison term for refusing to testify against his fellow Communists during the McCarthy witch hunts while still staying true to himself throughout his adult life.

Spade, like his creator, knows right from wrong every time unless it involves his libido. Miles Archer isn’t as smart or as trustworthy as Spade, but Spade still feels he has wronged his partner by sleeping with his wife and that makes him even more determined to see that Miles’ killer is brought to justice. When Archer’s murderer turns out to be Brigid O’Shaughnessy, the client Sam has been sleeping with, the central point that Sam’s libido is the source of the chaos in his world is brought home to him again and makes the book’s final scene where Sam faces Iva Archer all the more powerful as Spade has no choice but to accept that his own lust has made him a morally destructive force comparable to Casper Gutman, the Fat Man he so understandably despises.

As is the case with any true classic, this is but one aspect of what makes The Maltese Falcon a contender for the finest detective novel of all time and a book whose literary merit will make it the subject of discussion and a source of influence for decades to come. I remain a dedicated follower of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer stories, but like Hammett’s own subsequent Sam Spade stories (“A Man Called Spade,” “Too Many Have Lived,” and “They Can Only Hang You Once”) or Joe Gores’ recent prequel novel (Spade & Archer) or even John Huston’s classic 1941 film adaptation with Bogart, none of them are the Black Bird we’re seeking.

Peter Tremayne's DRACULA LIVES Trilogy Revisited

It has long been my belief that pulp fiction not discovered by age thirteen was beyond my ability to appreciate later. A certain amount of nostalgia seemed essential to enjoying the material once age and responsibility have got the better of you in life. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule in the rare instances where genuine literary talent was on evidence as is the case with the Holy Trinity of Hardboiled Detective Fiction: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. Given that my first two Seti Says posts concerned Bram Stoker's Dracula, I decided to revisit Peter Tremayne's three Dracula novels and one short story that I enjoyed so much as a teenager to see how they held up three decades on.

Peter Tremayne is best known today for his long-running Sister Fidelma mysteries. His medieval detective series is sort of a lightweight version of an Umberto Eco doorstop. Although Tremayne's real world credentials are quite impressive as both an academic and scholar, his fiction is strictly populist in its appeal. Turn back the clock 35 years and one would find Peter Tremayne as a dedicated pulp pastiche writer trying his hand at extending the lifespan of H. Rider Haggard's She Who Must Be Obeyed, deliriously combining Shelley's Frankenstein with Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles, and delving deep into Stoker's Dracula for a trilogy of loosely connected books published by Bailey Brothers in the UK.

The first of the trilogy, DRACULA UNBORN (US title: BLOODRIGHT) was written in 1974 and first published in 1977. Tremayne starts the story off with the author himself discovering a manuscript belonging to Stoker's fictional Dr. Seward at a swap meet in Islington. The manuscript is a translation by Professor Abraham Van Helsing of a late 15th Century memoir of Mircea Dracula, the youngest son of the historical Vlad Tepes. From there the story moves rapidly from the modern world referencing Stoker and actual Romanian history to Mircea's autobiography which reads, in the first few chapters, like a pastiche of a classic swashbuckler. Mircea is living a nobleman's life in Rome as Michelino. He has been raised in Italy after his mother fled Wallachia when he was a small child. Michelino is just the sort of rogue favored by Dumas or Sabatini in the fiction of the past two centuries. He is an excellent swordsman lacking in all scruples who thinks nothing of seducing a married woman as a means of settling a score with her husband. Fleeing an assassin set on his tail by the cuckolded husband (it's an unwritten rule that such characters never consider consequences of their actions), Michelino reverts to his true identity as Mircea Dracula and returns to the family home in Wallachia and Tremayne is ready to switch genres on the reader yet again.

Moving from the splendour of Roman villas to hoary old Transylvania with it's superstitious villagers and cobwebbed castles, Tremayne fails to evoke the effectiveness Stoker demonstrated in contrasting the New World with the Old. Instead the reader is given the awkward feeling of channel surfing between old movies. Part of the problem is the overall familiarity with the material. Tremayne recycles incidents and dialogue from Stoker's book and evokes scenes from Universal Horrors of the thirties and forties and from Hammer Horrors of the fifties and sixties. It must be said, to his credit, that upon publication DRACULA UNBORN was virtually unique. It may very well have been the first novel to fully integrate Stoker's vampire with the historical despot known as The Impaler. Today, the well-read Dracula aficionado will recognize Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally's research on Vlad Tepes is regurgitated nearly word for word in the pages of Tremayne's book. Its greatest interest lies in spotting the similarities (likely coincidental) between it and Jeanne Kalogridis' DIARIES OF THE FAMILY DRACUL trilogy from the nineties (books that are far too derivative of Anne Rice's LESTAT series for my taste despite Kalogridis' talent as a writer).

Tremayne improved the second time out with THE REVENGE OF DRACULA. Despite the rather silly title and even more raiding of lines and incidents from Stoker and monster movies of decades past, this is a great pulp novel. I would go so far as to say that I was sorry Tremayne tied Dracula into the proceedings at all as it would have stood alone easily as a thrilling weird mystery with no need for the vampire count to make an appearance. Once again, Tremayne starts the story with the author himself receiving the manuscript. This time, the story originates with a psychiatrist who takes the author to task for writing horror fiction by demonstrating the negative impact such work can have on impressionable minds in the form of a 19th Century memoir by one Upton Wellsford, a Vicar's son who toils in a lowly clerical position in the Foreign Office.

Upton has little use for God or country and consequently, is destined to pay the price for his arrogance. Of course, before the natural order is restored we get plenty of fun along the way. Upton buys an antique at a curio shop. A carved dragon that he suspects is Chinese in origin and, more importantly, pure jade despite the shopkeeper's ignorance. Gloating upon his valuable find, Upton is troubled by insomnia and strange dreams from this point forward in the narrative. Upton's recurring dream is that he is a Pagan priest set for sacrifice by a beautiful Pagan priestess. Of course, Upton is the reincarnation of an honorable Egyptian priest, Ki who was sacrificed to the demon, Draco by his lover, Queen Sebek-nefer-Ra centuries before. In due course, Upton meets his dream girl, Clara Clarke and falls in love. She is the reincarnation of Sebek-nefer-Ra and has been sharing the same recurring dream as Upton. Along the way we meet Upton's best friend, an amateur occultist who foolishly thinks he can contain the power held in the jade dragon and the Foreign Office sends Upton packing to Romania to attend a Coronation. By the time, Dracula turns up you're actually resentful. Tremayne does such a great job evoking the weird fiction prevalent in the first half of the last century that the vampire Count isn't needed. Tremayne takes the reader along on an emotional roller coaster as Upton and Clara barely escape Dracula with their lives only to suffer hardship in later years before coming to a tragic end. It's a bit of a downer, but a nice sting at the end with the psychiatrist's letter to Tremayne deriding horror fiction as utter nonsense worthy of scant attention.

A peculiar postscript of sorts exists with Tremayne's short story, "Dracula's Chair." He definitely suffered for poor titles early in his career. This short piece is largely unintelligible to the reader who hasn't read THE REVENGE OF DRACULA, but it would have been one wrinkle too many had it been included as a further epilogue as Tremayne originally intended. Once again, Tremayne places himself in the story as his wife picks up a Victorian chair for him at an antique shop. Once seated in the chair (which belonged to Upton Wellsford, ironically), Tremayne and Wellsford mystically switch souls with Tremayne fated to die at Dracula's hand in Wellsford's body at the horrific conclusion of THE REVENGE OF DRACULA with the knowledge that Wellsford has escaped death to live his life as Peter Tremayne, bestselling author in the 20th Century.

Tremayne's final visit to the character was with DRACULA, MY LOVE. Once again, his predilection for dreadful titles hampers him. The cover art and jacket blurb for the UK edition promise a Victorian version of TWILIGHT with Dracula falling in love with a proto-feminist. Happily, the book isn't quite that bad. This is really a novella rather than a full-length novel. Tremayne is back to introduce the novel as he is visited by Serban Mitikelu, a Romanian monk who shares with him the memoir of Morag MacLeod, a Victorian Scotswoman. The monk is killed by a vampire after leaving Tremayne's apartment. This is revealed at the end of his introduction instead of saving it for a suitably creepy ending.

Morag's life reads like a bowlderized version of Victorian pornography as she suffers rape and maltreatment at the hand of one cruel lord and squire after another. Happily, these details are not explicit, but are still unpleasant enough to make the reader feel queasy that it is being used as entertainment. Of course, if there's one thing Tremayne can be counted on for it is giving his libertine characters a proper Victorian comeuppance and Morag is no exception. When she falls in love, you can bet she will become pregnant, the father will die before they can wed, and his family will disown her as the harlot who seduced their son. Inevitably, Morag finds her way to Transylvania and Castle Dracula. The third time round, Tremayne's take on Stoker's household is so familiar that the over-familiarity kills it. There is a romance between the two, but it is not as much Barbara Cartland as the jacket blurb scares the reader into expecting. What really kills the book is Tremayne's insistence on shoehorning the historical Countess Elisabeth Bathory with Abraham Van Helsing into the proceedings. I know he's trying to set up Stoker's book (Kalogridis took much the same tact with her trilogy), the trouble is (as with Kalogridis) they make too much of Dracula's family and homelife. The sheer number of characters and knowing their muddled history (Dracula is actually Egyptian, not Transylvanian) makes you wish he had decided to use all original characters because in the end, Tremayne's take is his own and bears little resemblance to Stoker outside of what he chooses to steal. I happily choose pulp fiction over literature any day, but much as it pains me to say, Tom Wolfe was right, sometimes you can't go home again. Despite a near perfect pulp novel in the second book, Tremayne's trilogy (and one odd story) are not worthy of Dracula's noble title. I'll give his efforts two out of a possible five Mummies.



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