School Crush Brent Everett Y Brent Corrigan

The black peril yellow Lovers alone

S it is a character who personifies in the world of fiction, "the yellow peril," it is Dr. Fu Manchu .

Born in the early 1910s, the imagination of Sax Rohmer, the genius of evil, invisible yet ubiquitous, was a central figure of a dozen novels of the author, other authors of novels, a dozen films between 1920 and today, and even the inspiration for musical compositions.

With Dr. Fu Manchu, Sax Rohmer offers investigators an opponent quite different from those of other mystery writers offered at the time and even later: an opponent less tangible, it would not itself but through the henchmen and creatures in his pay (including the most improbable, like insects). Dimension "fantastic" is never far away, because Fu Manchu is able to mobilize knowledge that Westerners do not know, instilling doubt and fear in the minds of those who try to oppose him. Fu Manchu is an insidious disease, against which there appears not be a cure.

Fu Manchu personifies not only the fears of the West, which sees its colonial empire shaken by various rebellions, but also fears the most ancestral fears of the unknown, of the night fog, those strange plants and insects, venomous animals.

A modern reader may sometimes be uncomfortable reading the novels of Sax Rohmer. Not the malaise born of fear distilled by reading, but the discomfort of texts where the condescension of the West vis-à-vis 'native' all stripes often outcropping where the clichés about the malignancy or, conversely, the naivete of the "natives" are frequent. Novels reflections of their time? Novels cast of thought of their author? Novels reflect a misunderstanding, mixed with fascination of the East by the West A little of this, surely.

Anyway, the novels of the series remain Fu Manchu, now, fun to read. The mystery there tinge of humor, irony and self-mockery and, behind the archetypes, the characters finely brushed link.

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• For the curious English, a site not to miss: The page Fu Manchu

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