Lord of the Jackals

di Sax Rohmer (Autore)

The Copyright Group, 2024

Sax Rohmer was born on February 15th, 1883 as Arthur Henry Sarsfield in Birmingham to working class parents. Rohmer started his career as a civil servant but soon had ambitions to change careers and write full time. Not content with just fiction he wrote poetry, songs as well as comedy sketches for music hall performers. From these varied beginnings he reinvented himself as Sax Rohmer. He first published in 1903, age 20, with the short story ‘The Mysterious Mummy’ in the magazine Pearson’s Weekly. At this stage his early influences are easy to spot as he pays homage to both Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Together with his contemporaries Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, Rohmer claimed membership to a popular (among creatives) faction of the qabbalistic Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (a Western esoteric tradition involving mysticism, Gnosticism, and the occult. It is the underlying philosophy and framework for magical societies such as the Golden Dawn). His career, at this point, is one of transitioning from his earlier genres and short stories, the latter of which were in demand from the plethora of weekly and monthly magazines that were hungry for content and paid relatively well, to full length novels. In 1909 he married Rose Elizabeth Knox to whom he would remain married until his death half a century later. He published his first book Pause! anonymously in 1910 and followed this in 1911 with a stint as ghost-writer on the autobiography of Little Tich, the stage name of the famous 4’ 6” music hall entertainer Harry Relph. The serialization of his first Fu Manchu novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, from October 1912 to June 1913 brought him instant success. Though today his works are seen as morally flawed at the time the fast-paced story of Denis Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie facing the worldwide conspiracy of the ‘Yellow Peril’ meant only one thing. Sequels. The first three Fu Manchu books were published between 1913–1917. These books were also turned into two successful serials for the cinema by Stoll in the 1920s. (Stoll was based at its own film studios located in Cricklewood, in NW London, which operated from 1920 to 1938 and was owned by Sir Oswald Stoll as the principal base for his Stoll Pictures, which also operated from Surbiton Studios. The studio was the largest in Britain at the time. It was later used for the production of quota quickies. In 1938 the studios were sold off for non-film use. Sir Oswald Stoll is perhaps better known as a theatre owner.) Rohmer then put the character on hiatus whilst he attended to other works and characters. It was only after a 14-year absence in 1931 that Rohmer added a fourth to the series with The Daughter of Fu Manchu after pressure from both the Colliers Magazine and for the marketing opportunity about to be unveiled by the Paramount film The Mysterious Dr Fu Manchu, the first talkie version of his works. Rohmer's first effort at reviving the Fu Manchu property was eventually reworked as The Emperor of America as Rohmer was unhappy both with the book as outlined and as it finished. In the meantime, he tried to focus his creative abilities on what was first titled Fu Manchu's Daughter in 1930, but with an older, and knighted, Nayland Smith as the protagonist once more. The results were far superior and jump-started the series back to commercial prominence. In the 28 years from 1931 to 1959, Rohmer added no fewer than 10 new books to the Fu Manchu series, creating thirteen in total and, posthumously, a fourteenth with the collection The Wrath of Fu Manchu. The Fu Manchu series drew a lot of criticism both from the Chinese government and Chinese communities for what was seen as negative and ethnic stereotyping. Whilst many critics say they were products of their time that does not avoid the conflict with modern day sensibilities. Any writer would base a character on a friend or acquaint

• Autore: Sax Rohmer
• Durata in (hh:mm:ss): 00:46:54
• Anno edizione: 2024
• Editore: The Copyright Group
• EAN: 9781836821076

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