Fu-Manchu: The Bride of Fu-Manchu

A strange epidemic sweeps the French Riviera - a biological weapon created by Dr. Fu-Manchu. Dr. Petrie is called upon by the French authorities, and when the truth emerges, Denis Nayland-Smith is summoned to help stop his arch-foe before he can succeed in spreading his plague across Europe. As they struggle to contain the horror, Petrie's friend, the botanist Alan Sterling cannot stop thinking of the mysterious Fleurette, unaware that the beautiful girl he chanced upon was raised by the emperor of evil himself, Dr. Fu-Manchu.

One of the finest novels in the series, its biological theme is a precursor to Ian Fleming's On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and Fu-Manchu himself is the prototypical Dr. No.

Born Arthur Henry Ward in 1883, Sax Rohmer was four years old when Sherlock Holmes appeared in print. A journalist, poet, comedy sketch writer, and songwriter, he turned to fiction, and the first Fu-Manchu story, The Zayat Kiss, appeared in The Story-Teller magazine in October, 1912. That story became the beginning of the novel The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, and fourteen more followed, making Rohmer one of the most successful novelists of the 1920s and 1930s. Fu-Manchu has been featured in radio, television, comic strips, and comic books. In film he has been portrayed by such actors as Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, John Carradine, Peter Sellers, and Nicolas Cage. Rohmer died in 1959, a victim of an outbreak of the type A influenza known as the Asian flu.