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Best remembered as the creator of the criminal mastermind Dr. Fu Manchu, British author Sax Rohmer penned a remarkable variety of novels and short stories in the crime, mystery, and action-adventure genres. In The Golden Scorpion, intrepid detectives Gaston Max and Inspector Dunbar are in hot pursuit of a group of deadly assassins who appear to be systematically snuffing out the world's most prominent scientists..
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Badly produced edition
It’s a shilling-shocker potboiler so I didn’t expect much but I did expect it to have been proof-read.
It has been nicely formatted, but the OCR text has not been read through, allowing flaws in the source to appear as random punctuation and incorrect characters. The latter results in such gems as ‘the Walt of Aleppo’ and ‘a little Mack cap’ instead of ‘the Wali of Aleppo’ and ‘a little black cap’. Some parts I could not make sense of, especially when it came to the utterances of ‘Pidgin’, the Chinese operator of an opium den.
It’s a shilling-shocker potboiler so I didn’t expect much but I did expect it to have been proof-read.
It has been nicely formatted, but the OCR text has not been read through, allowing flaws in the source to appear as random punctuation and incorrect characters. The latter results in such gems as ‘the Walt of Aleppo’ and ‘a little Mack cap’ instead of ‘the Wali of Aleppo’ and ‘a little black cap’. Some parts I could not make sense of, especially when it came to the utterances of ‘Pidgin’, the Chinese operator of an opium den.
Classic Red Scare book! Back in the day when I was reading this stuff, Man from UNCLE books, and Ian Fleming, I loved his stuff for the eerie sense of mystery that seemed to cover everything like a fog. My favorite Rohmer book is still _The Dream Detective_ - a detective who solves mysteries by sleeping in the room where the murder has taken place.
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189+ Works 6,113 Members
Sax Rohmer was born in Birmingham, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he adopted the name Sarsfield, the name of a famous Irish general admired by Rohmer's mother. He married Rose Elizabeth Knox in 1909 and, at his wife's insistence, began using the name Sax Rohmer for his fiction, eventually employing the pseudonym as his actual name. Rohmer was show more basically a self-taught scholar. He started writing as a journalist; his beat was the Limehouse underworld in London. Rohmer had a difficult time breaking into the professional fiction markets, but once he did, he became a household name for exotic adventure both in England and in America. Although his writing brought Rohmer success and money, he was never much of a businessman, and most of his wealth was squandered because of his extravagance and through financial mismanagement. Rohmer eventually moved to New York City. One of Rohmer's great intellectual interests was the occult and supernatural, and these elements frequently appeared as motifs in his fiction. His most famous creation was the evil oriental mastermind, Dr. Fu Manchu, first presented in the novel The Mystery of Fu Manchu in 1913 (later retitled The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu for its American publication, also in 1913). Most espionage or adventure fiction exploits the social paranoias of its time, and Rohmer himself effectively tapped the Westerner's fear of the stereotyped "yellow peril" threat---the negatively perceived belief that Orientals will conquer the world. The Fu Manchu adventures were patterned, in part, after Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. Rohmer's protagonists in these adventures, Sir Denis Nayland Smith and his companion Dr. Petrie, look very much like Doyle's Holmes and Watson, but, whereas Doyle centered his narratives on the heroes and specifically on the elaborate process of detection, Rohmer focused his attention on the villain and on slam-bang action. Fu Manchu was a master of both Western science and Eastern mysticism, and his efforts at world domination caused no end of problems for Smith and Petrie. In Fu Manchu, Rohmer had created the most famous villain in popular fiction (although Rohmer maintained that Fu Manchu was based on an actual Limehouse criminal). Despite Rohmer's use of outrageous racial stereotyping, many of his novels hold up well today and provide superior examples of how to create narrative pacing and suspense. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- The golden scorpion
- Original publication date
- 1919-10-16
- People/Characters
- Gaston Max; Fu Manchu
- Important places
- Paris, France; New Scotland Yard, London, England, UK; Battersea, London, England, UK
- First words
- Keppel Stuart, M.D., F.R.S., awoke with a start and discovered himself to be bathed in cold perspiration.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)"We are defeated," he said. "'The Scorpion,' surrounded, destroys himself. It is the way of a scorpion."
- Disambiguation notice
- Originally serialized in the Illustrated London News, 1918.
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Statistics
- Members
- 139
- Popularity
- 234,561
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.56)
- Languages
- English, Hungarian, Portuguese
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 57
- ASINs
- 15
