Jack McColl and Sax Rohmer

Just a quick follow up from my post about David Downing’s new book Jack of Spies which starts out in Tsingtau (Qingdao) and Shanghai. At one point while the book’s amateur spy hero Jack McColl is in Shanghai he notes the success the previous summer (the summer of 1913) of the new tales of Dr Fu Manchu written by Sax Rohmer. Of course it was indeed 1913 when Sax Rohmer published the first Fu Manchu book, a collection of short stories The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu (or The Insidious Dr Fu Manchu, if you happened to be in America in 1913 where it went under that title) that had been published the year before separately in newspapers. Just in case you missed it that means that 2013 is the centenary of Fu Manchu. Downing’s character McColl would have had to read the first English edition to comment on the new series so early – and here’s the book he must have read….

The Methuen first edition hard cover from 1913