Dope / Yellow Shadows

DOPE

Rita Irvin is in a panic. She must see Kazmah immediately! She’s become hooked on the drugs that Kazmah supplies, and frantically enlists the aid of her old friend Sir Lucien to secure an appointment. But the meeting does not go well. There is a murder… a kidnapping… and now Chief Inspector Red Kerry is involved. But what can he do? There is a body, but no clues. Kazmah’s house has been picked clean. Rita’s husband is beside himself—Rita has completely disappeared. And as each hour, each day, goes by, Kerry begins to lose hope that they will find her alive, if at all. For behind Kazmah lurks the devious opium merchant Sin Sin Wa and his cunning wife, Mrs. Sin, who stop at nothing to hide their tracks!

YELLOW SHADOWS

Bernard Hope is returning to London by train when a frantic young woman boards at a stop and asks for his aid. He gives her his ticket and watches her quickly depart. But when he tries to depart the station himself, the police stop him. There has been a murder in Chinatown. Burma Chang, a very important man in the area, has been found dead in his home. And Hope can’t account for himself! Then Superintendent Red Kerry gets involved, and discovers a larger mystery than that of the hapless Hope. Chang has been cleverly poisoned in a house full of secret passageways. And it begins to look like Hope’s girlfriend Yvette is involved. What was Yvette doing at Burma Chang’s … and who was the mysterious woman on the train?

Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, known to readers as Sax Rohmer, was born in Birmingham on February 15, 1883 to a working class Irish Catholic family. He started his career writing songs and comedy sketches for Music Hall revues. His first novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, introduced the world to this mysterious and elusive villain, eventually featured in twelve subsequent novels. Rohmer took painstaking care in his arcane research, with many mysteries featuring such occult investigative characters as Gaston Max, “Red” Kerry, Morris Klaw and Paul Harley. Besides also authoring several novels of supernatural horror, toward the end of his career, Rohmer enjoyed another success with a female Fu Manchu known as Sumuru. He married Rose Elizabeth Knox in 1909 and after World War II, they moved to New York, returning to London shortly before Rohmer’s death in London on June 1, 1959, of influenza.