R ohmer, S ax

Sax Rohmer (1883–1959) was the pen‐name of Arthur Henry Ward, best remembered for his series of novels featuring the villainous Chinese mastermind Dr. Fu Manchu. Rohmer's evil genius possesses “all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect,” and, “with all the resources of science, past and present,” plots world domination from his hidden lair concealed deep within the fog‐bound labyrinth of London's Limehouse Chinatown (1913: 84). The fiction of the late‐Victorian Gothic revival asserts that the greatest threat to Britain and its empire lurked within the imperial metropolis itself (see imperial gothic ). Along with Count Dracula and the werewolves, mummies, and other monsters of fin‐de‐siècle London, Dr. Fu Manchu has become an enduring icon of the Gothic.