The Yellow Claw / the Golden Scorpion

Rohmer created Fu Manchu and other superb villains. In these two mysteries, we are introduced to Gaston Max, a Parisian detective and a master of disguise, hot in the pursuit of two criminal masterminds who seek to undermine the very fabric of British society.

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, selling his first story to Pearson s Weekly in 1903. His first novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, originally serialized in 1912, 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.