Brood of the Witch-Queen
By Sax Rohmer
Robert Cairn looked out across the quadrangle. The moon had just arisen, and it softened the beauty of the old college buildings and mellowed the harshness of time, casting shadow pools beneath the cloisteresque arches to the west and setting out the ivy in more muscular relief upon the ancient walls. The hidden gate cast the barred shadow on the lichened stones beyond the elm, and straight ahead, where, between a quaint chimney-stack and a bartizan, a triangular patch of blue showed like spangled velvet, lay the Thames. From there, the cooling breeze came.
But Cairn’s gaze was set upon a window almost directly ahead and west below the chimneys. Within the room to which it belonged, a lambent light played.
Cairn turned to his companion, a ruddy and athletic-looking man, somewhat bovine in type, who was busy tracing sections of a human skull and checking his calculations from Ross’s Diseases of the Nervous System.
“Sime,” he said, “what does Ferrara always have a fire in his rooms for at this time of the year?”
Sime glanced up irritably at the speaker. Cairn was a tall, thin Scotsman, clean-shaven, square-jawed, with crisp, light hair and grey eyes, which often bespeak unusual virility.
“Aren’t you going to do any work?” he inquired pathetically. “I thought you’d come to give me a hand with my basal ganglia. I shall go down on that, and you’ve been stuck staring out of the window!”
“Wilson, in the end house, has got a most unusual brain,” said Cairn, with apparent irrelevance.
“Has he!” snapped Sime.
“Yes, in a bottle. His governor is at Bart’s; he sent it up yesterday. You ought to see it.”
“Nobody will ever want to put your brain in a bottle,” predicted the scowling Sime and resumed his studies.
Cairn relighted his pipe, staring across the quadrangle again. Then—
“You’ve never been in Ferrara’s rooms, have you?” he inquired.
Followed a muffled curse, crash, and the skull went rolling across the floor.
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Sax Rohmer
Arthur Henry “Sarsfield” Ward (15 February 1883 – 1 June 1959), better known as Sax Rohmer, was an English novelist. He is best remembered for his series of novels featuring the master criminal Fu Manchu.
Biography.
Born in Birmingham to working-class Irish parents William Ward (c. 1850–1932), a clerk, and Margaret Mary (1850–1901), Arthur Ward initially pursued a career as a civil servant before concentrating on writing full-time. He was a poet, songwriter, and comedy sketch writer for music hall performers before creating the Sax Rohmer persona and pursuing a career writing fiction.
Like his contemporaries Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, Rohmer claimed membership in one of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn factions and tied it to the Rosicrucians. Still, the validity of his claims has been questioned. His doctor and family friend, Dr R. Watson Councell, may have been his only legitimate connection to such organisations. His first published work was issued in 1903 when the short story “The Mysterious Mummy” was sold to Pearson’s Weekly. Rohmer’s main literary influences are Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and M. P. Shiel. He gradually transitioned from writing for music hall performers to concentrating on short stories and serials for magazine publication. In 1909, he married Rose Elizabeth Knox. He published his first book, Pause! Anonymously in 1910. In 1934, Sax Rohmer moved into a newly refurbished house, Little Gatton, on Gatton Road, Reigate, Surrey, where he lived until 1946. He died after succumbing to Asian flu in 1959.
After penning Little Tich in 1911 (as a ghostwriter for the music hall entertainer of the same name), he wrote the first Fu Manchu novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, first published in a seriserializationm October 1912 to June 1913. It was an immediate success, with its story of Denis Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie facing the supposed worldwide conspiracy of the “Yellow Peril”. The Fu Manchu stories, together with his more conventional detective series characters — Paul Harley, Gaston Max, Red Kerry, Morris Klaw (an occult detective), and the Crime Magnet — made Rohmer one of the most successful and financially well-off authors of the 1920s and 1930s.
The first three Fu Manchu books were published in the four years between 1913 and 1917, but it was not until 1931 (some 14 years after the third book in the series) that Rohmer returned to the series with Daughter of Fu Manchu. The long interval was because Rohmer wanted to eliminate the series after The Si-Fan Mysteries. Stoll had successfully filmed the first three books in the twenties as a pair of serials.
Rohmer’s first effort at reviving the Fu Manchu property was ultimately reworked as The Emperor of America. The original intent had been for the head of the organization, Fu Manchu’s daughter. He kept Head Centre as a female criminal mastermind to combat Drake Roscoe but was very unhappy with the book as it started and in its finished form. He would later return to Drake Roscoe and his female supervillain for the Sumuru series. In the meantime, he tried again to focus his energies on what was first titled Fu Manchu’s Daughter for Collier’s in 1930, but with an older (now knighted) Denis Nayland Smith as the protagonist once more. The results were infinitely better, and the series was jump-started.
In the 28 years from 1931 to 1959, Rohmer added ten books to the Fu Manchu series, meaning the series totals 13 books in all (not counting the posthumous short story collection The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other Stories). The Fu Manchu series was criticized by the Chinese government and Chinese communities in the U.S. for what was perceived as negative ethnic stereotyping. Sociologist Virginia Berridge has stated that Rohmer created a false image of London’s Chinese community as crime-ridden, further claiming that the Limehouse Chinese were one of the most law-abiding of London’s ethnic minorities. Critic Jack Adrian has written: “Rohmer’s racism was careless and casual, a mere symptom of his times”. Colin Watson commented: “So vehement and repetitive were Sax Rohmer’s references to Asiatic plotting against ‘white’ civ civilization they cannot be explained simply as the frills of melodramatic narration.”
Sax Rohmer
