Mon 15 Feb 2016
Reviewed by David Vineyard: WILLIAM PATRICK MAYNARD – The Destiny of Fu Manchu.
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Reviews[6] Comments
WILLIAM PATRICK MAYNARD – The Destiny of Fu Manchu. Black Coat Press, hardcover, March 2012; paperback, April 2012.
A confession before going farther with this review, Black Coat Press is my publisher, and I am friends on Facebook with William Patrick Maynard, but otherwise this review is as honest as I can make it.
Pastiche is a difficult art at best. The writer usually will suffer in comparison to the original, and if he surpasses the original is too often denied the recognition he deserves. A perfect example is Barry Perowne’s pastiche of E. W. Hornung’s Raffles stories, where little that Hornung wrote is anywhere near as entertaining as Perowne’s stories, but Perowne is only a footnote today.
Both Philip Jose Farmer and Fritz Leiber were better writers than Edgar Rice Burroughs when they tried their hands at Tarzan pastiche, and I don’t think anyone would argue Ian Fleming was anywhere near as good a writer overall as Kingsley Amis, Sebastian Faulks, or William Boyd who all tackled James Bond with varying grades of success. Having written several Arsene Lupin pastiche, I can tell you no matter how good the story is, you always come in second to the original.
The saga of Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu has already suffered this humiliation earlier with Rohmer biographer Cay Van Ash writing two novels featuring Rohmer’s characters that both far exceeded the best work Rohmer himself did in terms of story, thrills, and sheer writing skill.
I say this not to fault Rohmer, whose work I enjoy, but merely to state the obvious, that Rohmer himself never did justice to his own creation, in my opinion. His best books in the series do not come anywhere near Van Ash’s Ten Years Beyond Baker Street and The Fires of Fu Manchu.
Now William Patrick Maynard has taken up the saga of the Devil Doctor, and like Cay Van Ash before him, has far exceeded the best Sax Rohmer had to offer.
The Destiny of Fu Manchu does take a note from Rohmer in that it plunges right into the story with Dr. John Petrie, the Watson to the evil doctor’s nemesis Sir Denis Nayland Smith, pushed into the affair on his own doorstep.
Next we are swept off to Corfu, and a new narrator, Michael Knox, an archaeologist who is a bit of a rotter with women, and hardly the most heroic of figures, stumbling on the kidnapping of Kara, Mrs. Petrie, and finding himself in the midst of the world of the Si Fan. He is thrown headlong into one incident after another, eventually finding himself about to be killed on the Orient Express by a homicidal dwarf traveling as a five year old girl.
And we are off, Ethiopia, London, Egypt, Munich … as Knox finds himself a pawn in an increasingly dangerous and confusing game caught between a civil war for control of the Si Fan, Sir Nayland Smith, the weakness of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and Hitler’s pre-War power grabs.
At times who is on whose side is as confusing as an Eric Ambler novel, with Knox a pawn of Fu Manchu’s rival, the horribly disfigured Esteban Milagro, aka Thomas Valley, aka Khunum-Khufu, aka …; Helga Grauman, aka Fah lo Suee, Fu Manchu’s daughter, whose memory of that fact was removed by her father; Sir Denis Nayland Smith who just saved Hitler and Mussolini from assassination by the Si Fan; and of course Fu Manchu himself who may or may not be calling the shots and manipulating everyone to his own evil goal having been deposed from leadership of the Si Fan after his failure to kill Hitler and Mussolini.
This is all splendid pulp, rapidly paced, and surprisingly as atmospheric as the original. Maynard’s imagination never fails him, and he manages to keep the complex plot in the air with remarkable ease. Characters from past Rohmer novels and from Cay Van Ash’s books make cameos or have full roles, and there is even a nod to Guy Boothby’s Italian Menace of an earlier age, Dr. Nikola.
Everything turns on Fu Manchu’s plot to avert the coming war by so devastating the West with a terrible plague that he can seize power.
To the extent he can, Maynard avoids the obvious pitfalls of anachronism. The term Oriental is tossed around freely as it would be in that day and age, and the characters are far from prescient. Nayland Smith is blind to everything but defeating Fu Manchu, though not unaware of other evils, the narrator redeems himself, but not without suffering, and in the end the world is saved from one terrible fate at the cost of another.
Maynard’s willingness to allow this bit of historical irony to weigh on the otherwise satisfactory conclusion without any heavy-handed message is one of the book’s pleasures. He is well aware of our foreknowledge, but never allows that to color his characters or their actions. They are merely reacting in the moment as most people do in times of stress and danger.
If you loved Rohmer, I think this will entertain you, and if, like me, you always thought Rohmer’s own Fu Manchu tales lacked a bit, then this should please you. Maynard has the voice down pat, and frankly he is a better storyteller overall than Rohmer, whose best work was not in the Fu Manchu series.
This is full-blooded old-fashioned pulp writing, fully aware of all the flaws and evils of the Yellow Peril fiction it represents, but managing to both entertain and remind us of our own prejudices and those of the time it is set in at the same time.
It is the best Fu Manchu novel Sax Rohmer never wrote.
Bibliographic Note: William Patrick Maynard is also the author of The Terror of Fu Manchu (2009).
February 15th, 2016 at 10:33 pm
I really enjoyed the Fu Manchu stories when I was 18 or so, and I have a complete set of the Pyramid paperbacks. But when I tried to read one again a couple of years ago, I put it down and never picked it back up again. Time has a way of changing things, doesn’t it?
I may try one of Maynard’s two books, though. You make a strong case for this one, David.
February 15th, 2016 at 11:39 pm
Rohmer’s best work was in non Fu Manchu series titles like BROOD OF THE WITCH QUEEN, QUEST OF THE SACRED SLIPPER, GREEN EYES OF BAST, THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED (Gaston Max series), the Paul Harley titles FIRE TONGUE and BAT WING and some of the short story collections such as MORRIS KLAW DREAM DETECTIVE and BIMBASHI BARUK OF EGYPT.
The best of the Fu Manchu titles are DAUGHTER, DRUM, MASK, BRIDES, PRESIDENT, WRATH, and ISLAND, but the latter mostly because it has literal Fu fighters rather than Foo Fighters and Fu Manchu finally gets so frustrated with Petrie and Smith’s stupidity he throws a hissy fit. As S.J. Perlman rightly pointed out the Fu Manchu books are racist, all the Anglo Saxons in them are idiots.
Maynard manages to update everything while staying within the original time period with a more believable hero and a more ambiguous take on the obsessed Smith. His Fu Manchu is still evil, but a man of immense intellect and not mere cruelty, something Rohmer spoke of but did not always live up to.
The books are pure pulp, almost constant action careening from one set piece to the next, which is frankly what I always wanted of Rohmer who could get a bit talky at times. As pastiche they capture the nostalgia for the original and at the same time they are better reading for modern readers.
I also like that the narrator isn’t quite as innocent and noble as Rohmer’s heroes. You have a little suspense generated in whether he is going to live up to what is expected of him, and early in the book he does what most of us would likely do when so threatened, he runs and tries to go undercover.
You likely should read TERROR first, but I happened to have this one handy, and it didn’t take too much to catch up with events from the previous book or things mentioned the happened in the Van Ash titles.
For me the Fu Manchu novels always promised more than they delivered, but these and the Van Ash novel delivered. They would have set well in COLLIERS where Fu Manchu first lurked and the pulps as well.
February 16th, 2016 at 10:08 am
I strongly disagree with your comment that Farmer wrote a better Tarzan than ERB. Granted his Tarzan and Doc Savage books were more pornographic than ERB or Lester Dent, that did not make them ‘better’.
February 16th, 2016 at 1:57 pm
I’ve never read a review or comment by David Vineyard that wasn’t interesting and informative; in addition to those qualities, I found this review to be provocative as well. In the interest of full disclosure, I will preface this comment by invoking Pogo’s immortal line, “We have met the enemy and He is Us,” for I began my career as the ghost writer of a dozen Don Pendleton Mack Bolan novels and have of late had published a Sherlock Holmes pastiche (ahem, “Zombies Over London”). So with that out of the way: Another writer could improve on Rohmer’s Fu Manchu tales!? Another writer than Fleming could improve on the James Bond series!? Nope. And I say Nope without having read the books under review due to a personal reading prejudice. I am an Ian Fleming fan, not a James Bond fan. A Sax Rohmer fan, not a Fu Manchu fan. A Don Pendleton devotee, not a Mack Bolan collector. These characters entertain as they do because they spring from the unique, individual, singular genius of their creators who, yes, were writing for a market, but, and to me this is significant, they were marketing their own genius; they were not, as Chandler once so nicely put it in another context, “traveling on borrowed gasoline.” I have the utmost respect for Cay van Ash’s Rohmer memoirs, and an appreciation for the many fans of popular characters of whom they appear unable to get enough. But before I give much attention to Mr. Van Ash or Mr. Maynard beyond this comment, they will need to create their own Bond or Fu Manchu or Bolan, or at any rate begin traveling on their own gasoline.
February 16th, 2016 at 4:18 pm
EMG3
I said Farmer was a better writer than ERB, not that his Tarzan novel was better, it wasn’t, and in fact was a failure. Leiber didn’t write a better Tarzan novel either, but he was a better writer, and that is all I said.
Stephen Mertz,
Again I said those writers were better writers than Fleming. They did not do as well with Bond, though Boyd’s book SOLO was very good. I am a huge Fleming fan, but I do not pretend he is as serious or important a writer as Amis, Boyd, or Faulks in strictly literary terms, he wrote too fast and was sometimes lazy, but he certainly wrote Bond better, because Bond was a fantasy extension of Fleming. At his best Fleming is a voice as unmistakable as Chandler when writing Bond and no one has approached that, a sort of whiskey soaked Fleet Street voice no one else has really equaled and certainly not surpassed. Even Anthony Horowitz who gets very close sometimes doesn’t quite manage it. In fact Amis, Faulks, Horowitz, and Boyd all were Fleming fans and wrote about that factin relation to their books.
I’m sorry if I lead anyone to think I thought the writers mentioned were better at what Fleming and Burroughs did than the originals, but I don’t think anyone could seriously argue they weren’t better writers in the broader view.
Graham Greene once attended a luncheon with Edgar Wallace and then literary icon Hugh Walpole and confessed in print he preferred Wallace, who could write too fast, and was not the craftsman Walpole was, but who he much preferred to read. I agree. Walpole does not hold up as well though some of his thrillers deserve to be read today.
Hemingway was a better writer than Hammett and Chandler, but his attempt at a tough guy novel, TO HAVE AND TO HAVE NOT, is one of his weakest books and doesn’t compare well to their best in that field. Hemingway wanted to prove that being tough alone would not save a man, and both Hammett and Chandler proved it better than him in better books in my view, he simply failed to understand what they were saying.
As for pastiche it happens sometimes that better writers do follow the original. Perowne was a better writer than Hornung and most critics agree on that. That takes nothing away from Hornung as the creator of Raffles, and it is the originals that survive. On the other hand Gerard Fairlie was a better writer than H.C. McNeile, but his Bulldog Drummond outings aren’t as good, and he ‘was’ Drummond according to McNeile.
I enjoyed the original Fu Manchu novels, but borrowed glory or not the pastiche by Van Ash and Maynard are better reads, certainly than the handful of books about Fu Manchu written in the post War period. Rohmer could be highly effective, but no one ever argued he was a particularly good writer. He became better over the years but age and drink took their effect too, and he was not a careful craftsman.
Disliking pastiche is fine. Don’t read them. I gave up on Sherlock Holmes pastiche years ago save for some older writers who were entertaining with it or August Derlith’s Solar Pons (and then Basil Copper’s pastiche of the pastiche). Most pastiche and continuations don’t work, because, as I said, it is a largely thankless job for any writer trying to recapture the quality that made the original work.
I happen to think Van Ash and Maynard do manage to recapture and even exceed Rohmer, that takes nothing away from Rohmer as the creator and moving force behind the books and the character, and they are careful, as were the Fleming and Burroughs pastiche, to defer to the original.
Writers over the years who have tackled pastiche or at least continuations of others creations include Louis L’Amour, Bill Pronzini, Max Allan Collins, Denis Lynds, L. Sprague de Camp, Poul Anderson, Vincent Starrett, Manly Wade Wellman, Loren Estleman, Robert B. Parker, and Michael Moorcock, not a shoddy lot of writers. Some succeeded and some failed, but as long as it is done out of respect and a genuine love of the original I don’t see the problem. It’s hardly new. Jack London used to buy plots from young Sinclair Lewis late in his career and Jules Verne wrote a sequel to Poe’s only novel. Virgil wrote a sequel to the ILIAD. The whole Arthurian saga is one long pastiche including Tennyson and Pyle. It’s an old literary urge. Like prostitution, it may not be entirely ethical, but it is there still.
February 24th, 2017 at 10:51 am
Hear! Hear! I agree that Maynard pulls off the (usually) impossible task of writing a pastiche that is faithful in tone AND details (a pastiche must have both) while surpassing the original. I was very pleasantly surprised. I would go so far to say that I wish Mr. Maynard would simply go back and rewrite/edit Rohmer’s entire canon. Rohmer had great ideas but nearly always slipped a bit when giving them their full due.