Houghton Library's Fu Manchu collection.

Ad for The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929)

In this blog post, Harvard's Houghton Library highlights its collection of volumes by Sax Rohmer featuring the nefarious Dr. Fu Manchu and discusses fears of the "yellow peril."

Sax Rohmer speaks.

Among the goodies just uploaded to YouTube by British Movietone is footage from 1932 of Fu Manchu creator Sax Rohmer (aka Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward) talking about the levels of U.S. versus British crime.

Bibliography, early occult detectives in fiction.

Willa Cather, NYPL

In time for Halloween, Clues contributor Tim Prchal (under his pseudonym Tim Prasil) is compiling a "chronological bibliography of early occult detectives" that begins in 1817 with Doktor K in E. T. A. Hoffman's "Das oede Haus" and runs to 1938 with Judge Keith Hillary Pursuivant in works by Gans T. Field. Authors include Alice and Claude Askew, Willa Cather, Arthur Conan Doyle, F. Tennyson Jesse, Arthur Machen, Sax Rohmer, and the obligatory Bram Stoker.

The religions of comic book characters.

Jimmy Olsen, Lutheran.

Wondering about the religious affiliations of Commissioner Gordon, Dick Tracy, Fu Manchu, The Space Turnip, and other comic book characters? You now can consult this handy database. (thanks to AHA blog)

BL exhibition: Murder in the Library.

Ad for Sax Rohmer's
The Return of Fu Manchu
New York Sun, Mar 11, 1916
The nefarious criminal is
featured in the BL exhibition.

Opening today at the British Library's Folio Society Gallery is the exhibition "Murder in the Library: An A-Z of Crime Fiction," which looks at the history of the genre and runs to May 12. There also will be some events in conjunction with the exhibition:

• Real Crime, Real Fiction, January 21. With Barry Forshaw, Laura Wilson, and others. (Listen to the podcast here)

• The Story of Crime Fiction, February 8. With BBC Radio 4's Mark Lawson, P.D. James, and others.

• The Female Detective, March 8. Guests not yet announced.

Update: TLS review of the exhibition with images of some items from it.

Haycraft-Queen: More titles back in print.

Welcome developments in reprints of titles on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list (those mysteries deemed essential by Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen):

• Arcturus Crime Classics has reprinted Helen McCloy's Through a Glass, Darkly and Francis Iles's Before the Fact

• Bello (an imprint of Macmillan) has reissued Roy Vickers's The Department of Dead Ends

• Felony & Mayhem has reprinted Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop

• Ramble House has an edition of Harvey J. O'Higgins's Detective Duff Unravels It

• Titan Books has reissued Sax Rohmer's The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu

• There are new ebook versions of Charlotte Armstrong's The Unsuspected (1947 film available on DVD as well) and Clayton Rawson's Death from a Top Hat

Note that there was a 2011 edition of Helen Eustis's The Horizontal Man in ImPress's Best Mysteries of All Time series, but this is an abridged version, and I believe this series is available only by subscription.

And to recap previous HQ reissues:
• Rue Morgue Press's new editions of Manning Coles's Pray Silence (US title: A Toast to Tomorrow) and John Dickson Carr's The Judas Window and The Crooked Hinge

• Blue Dolphin Publishing's reissue of H. F. Heard's A Taste for Honey

Haycraft-Queen Out-of-Print Titles in the United States (compiled and revised by Elizabeth Foxwell)

Anderson Frederick Irving - The Book of Murder - 1930
Bailey H. C. - The Red Castle - 1932
Benson G. R. - Tracks in the Snow - 1906
Charteris Leslie [Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin] - Meet the Tiger - 1928
Coates Robert M. - Wisteria Cottage - 1948
Cole G. D. H. [G. D. H. Cole and Margaret Cole] - The Brooklyn Murders - 1923 
Dane Clemence [Winifred Ashton] and Helen Simpson - Re-enter Sir John - 1932
Davis Dorothy Salisbury - A Gentle Murderer - 1951
De la Torre Lillian [Lillian McCue] - Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector - 1946
Dickson Carter [John Dickson Carr] - Lord of the Sorcerers - 1946
Dunsany Lord - The Little Tales of Smethers - 1952
Eberhart Mignon G. - The Patient in Room 18 - 1929
Ellin Stanley - Dreadful Summit - 1948
Eustis Helen - The Horizontal Man - 1946
Frome David [Zenith Jones Brown] - The Hammersmith Murders - 1930
Gardner Erle Stanley - The Case of the Sulky Girl - 1933
Halsey Harlan Page - Old Sleuth, the Detective - 1872
Hammett Dashiell - The Adventures of Sam Spade - 1944
Hart Frances Noyes - The Bellamy Trial - 1927
Hughes Dorothy B. - The So Blue Marble - 1940
King Rufus - Murder by the Clock - 1929
Lawrence Hilda - Blood Upon the Snow - 1944
Lipsky Eleazar - The People Against O’Hara - 1950
Lockridge Frances and Richard Lockridge - The Norths Meet Murder - 1940
Lustgarten Edgar - A Case to Answer - 1947
MacDonald Philip - The Rasp - 1924
MacDonald Philip - The Nursemaid Who Disappeared [aka Warrant for X] - 1938
MacHarg William and Edwin Balmer - The Achievements of Luther Trant - 1910
Marquand John P. - No Hero - 1935
Paul Elliot - The Mysterious Mickey Finn - 1939
Piper Evelyn [Merriam Modell] - The Motive - 1950
Rhode John - The Murders in Praed Street - 1928
Rhode John - The Paddington Mystery - 1925
Rice Craig - Trial by Fury - 1941
Ross Barnaby [Ellery Queen] - The Tragedy of Y - 1932
Seeley Mabel - The Listening House - 1938
Stribling T. S. - Clues of the Caribbees - 1929
Trevor Glen [James Hilton] - Murder at School [aka Was It Murder?] - 1931
Van Dine S. S. [Willard Huntington Wright] - The Benson Murder Case - 1926
Walling R. A. J. - The Fatal Five Minutes - 1932
Walsh Thomas - Nightmare in Manhattan - 1950
Waters [William Russell] - Recollections of a Detective Police Officer - 1856
Wells Carolyn - The Clue - 1909

Monash's "Body in the Library" exhibition.

Cover of the Detection Club's
Ask a Policeman, featured in the
Monash University exhibition

Monash University's "The Body in the Library' exhibition provides a rich visual panorama of mystery history and is on display until June 8. Online highlights include covers of wonderfully lurid works by Sax Rohmer, various Detection Club works, detective magazines, and one of the Dick Donovan series that is contemporary with the Holmes stories (series discussed in Clues 26.2). Not surprisingly for an Australian university, special attention is paid to Australian and New Zealand authors (such as Fergus Hume, Ngaio Marsh, Helen Simpson, and Arthur Upfield) and an Australian round-robin mystery novel of 1936. A welcome addition is "Clarice Dyke, the Female Detective" (1883) by Harry Rockwood (aka Ernest A. Young) that features an early female sleuth.

NYT-reviewed mysteries, June 1936.

Reviewed this week in the NYT 75 years ago:

• Murder of a Matriarch by Hugh Austin. "If you can determine not only the murderer but also the method, go to the head of the class."

• Strange Houses by Cora Jarrett. "a puzzle which unravels to a surprising end . . . the main lines of interest draw taut early and never slacken."

Sax Rohmer, from
the New York Tribune,
Apr 18, 1920

• X. Jones of Scotland Yard by the ever-odd Harry Stephen Keeler. "A lot of pother over something that nobody cares a whoop about."

• President Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer.  "Fiction's most magnificent criminal turns his green eyes on the United States."

Steal this book.

As the October 15, 1922, Library Journal reported in "Favorite Books of the Lightfingered," the books of mystery writers were the most

Sax Rohmer, from the
New York Tribune,
Apr 18, 1920

popular ones taken from the Grand Rapids Public Library, along with those of adventure and western authors. Among those most popular with thieves:

• Zane Grey, including 3 copies of Rainbow Trail (1915)

• E. Phillips Oppenheim

• Mary Roberts Rinehart, Amazing Interlude (1918) and More Tish (1921)

• Sax Rohmer, The Golden Scorpion (1919; "a galloping, breath-taking yarn" according to its advertisements)

Happy birthday, Sax Rohmer.

Boris Karloff as the
fiendish Dr. Fu Manchu
in The Mask of Fu
Manchu (1932)

British author Sax Rohmer, aka Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, was born on February 15, 1883, in Birmingham. He died in 1959. His nefarious creation, Dr. Fu Manchu, debuted in "The Zayat Kiss" in 1912.

Happy birthday, Sax Rohmer.

British author Sax Rohmer, aka Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, was born on February 15, 1886. He died in 1959. His nefarious creation, Dr. Fu Manchu, made his debut in "The Zayat Kiss" in 1912.