Thoughts On An Evil Genius

Quick! Think about the blueprint on which most evil masterminds like Dr. No or Dr. Doom or other evil geniuses are based. What name would you put on that? If I were a betting girl, I’d bet that most of you said ‘Professor Moriarty’ (James, if you’re on first-name terms). And most of you would be wrong, because that position belongs to another who has been out and about a lot more than the esteemed professor of mathematics: Dr. Fu-Manchu.

Professor Moriarty, despite being a villain movies and TV series about Sherlock Holmes (and the modern additions to the canon) like to pit against the Great Detective, only features in one story written by Arthur Conan Doyle (“The Final Problem”). It’s likely Doyle chose a mirror version of Sherlock Holmes to kill him (only he wasn’t allowed to let his detective rest). We learn little about Moriarty on the whole, merely that he is a professor of mathematics and that he is head of a criminal organisation spread throughout the British Empire (and beyond, one might suspect). He is a criminal mastermind, but we learn little about his powers. We even learn little about him as a person, since his fight with Sherlock Holmes happens off-screen - Watson comes too late to save his friend and only finds a message. He is not the kind of blueprint the average evil genius is derived from.

Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu-Manchu, on the other hand, has had ample time to imprint himself into the memories of readers, viewers, and writers alike. From 1913’s “The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu” to 1959’s “Emperor Fu-Manchu,” Rohmer himself brought the sinister Chinese doctor back to life over and over again. He was followed by other writers, 2012 (according to Wikipedia) having been the year of the last release so far (more have been announced).

Fu-Manchu is such a staple that one of the three evil geniuses in the computer game “Evil Genius” was styled after him: a tall, lean Chinese with green eyes (which is, pretty much, the first description ever given of him in “The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu”). Professor Moriarty has no evil genius styled after him (the other two are a bald, slightly chubby millionaire and a femme fatale).

Make no mistake, the original novels are filled with racial stereotypes which, while understandable during Rohmer’s time, are not acceptable for a modern writer, but as with Jules de Grandin, it’s important not to expect modern sensibilities from a writer who lived a long time ago. And, as much as all of the non-white characters are written in a stereotypical way, the Chinese Dr. Fu-Manchu remains a strong and powerful character who seems rarely hindered by the shortcomings which are implied about Chinese people on the whole. He poses a definite threat to the heroes (Nayland Smith and Dr. Petri in the first three novels, with Petri being the Watsonian viewpoint character) and more often than not, it’s the intervention from a third party which saves the lives of the heroes. Fu-Manchu doesn’t just hatch big plans, he also pulls through with them. He’s ahead of the game, which allows for him to disappear in time (until the very end, when he usually seems to die - only to pop up again in the next instalment). He is way ahead of Smith (as his main adversary) and he has unlimited resources in loyal henchmen, dangerous creatures, and exotic drugs and poisons.

Of course, the stories profit immensely from the time they were written in - a time before mass media and internet access when nobody could just look up specific poisons and find out they didn’t exist and when you could invent new people from the far corners of the earth as much as you liked, because those corners were too far and too dangerous for most people to travel. Like most pulp stories (for that is, in essence, what they are), the Fu-Manchu novels do not hold up to too much questioning and you need to do a bit of heavy lifting to believe the characters (especially Dr. Petri by himself) always cross paths with Fu-Manchu again. One should think that a genius of his level would learn to leave Smith alone and avoid him with all his powers after a few meetings. But then, the Devil Doctor is very arrogant and that can explain quite a bit. Arrogance is a usual downfall for evil overlords, masterminds, or geniuses, after all.

Still, when I recently returned to the stories, I found them engaging and interesting to read. And I realized that modern evil geniuses have a lot more to do with Fu-Manchu than with Moriarty (if only because we don’t see that much of Moriarty, unless you look into modern versions of him which, in turn, were influenced by other evil geniuses). Fu-Manchu is the shadow in the back, the one who pulls the strings and lets many, many people dance to his music. He is the one who arranges for everything to fit with his plans, who has henchmen (many of them, of course, Asian), who hatches his successful evil plans. He is much more than just a criminal, he’s a man who strives for world domination. It’s not just about controlling the underworld, his plans are aimed at changing the world’s power structure and putting those into positions of power he has control over. He has much more in common with the average Bond villain than Moriarty ever will.

And that is what makes the stories interesting to read. First of all, Fu-Manchu clearly doesn’t do evil for evil’s sake. He considers the murders, kidnappings, and other crimes to be a necessary part of his plans - and his plans are too important to worry about morals. He also might be highly amoral himself, which his creator would attribute to him being Chinese (and thus ‘below’ the white race), but a modern author might, indeed, attribute to him being a psychopath, as many comic book or movie villains of his type. He surely fits with the basic attributes of a psychopath:

• Lack of empathy: check
• Grandiose sense of self-worth: check
• Wide array of crimes and methods: check
• Manipulative mindset: check
• Deceptive tactics: check
• Risk-prone behaviour: check

He’s also one of those villains who kill their minions for blunders (which, if you really think about it, is pretty stupid - good henches don’t grow on trees). And the first, perhaps, whose daughter sometimes works against him (a trope with the children of evil masterminds you can find quite often - although in her case it’s because she wants to replace him, not because she’s in love with his nemesis).

And remember how I mentioned that Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to kill Sherlock Holmes, because he was fed up with him? The same happened with Sax Rohmer and Fu-Manchu. He didn’t like the character that much, but the audience loved the stories and wanted to read about the man again and again. Rohmer obliged and thus we have quite a few stories (13 novels by Rohmer overall, plus a collection of short stories), although there are sometimes long periods between their releases. Yet, Fu-Manchu survived his creator, just as he survived the end of every novel, despite things looking the other way. Nayland Smith’s insistence at the end of “The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu” that he will only believe Fu-Manchu is dead once he’s seen a body rings true for the series on the whole - and is one more thing which Fu-Manchu left to the community of evil geniuses.

There are things to be learned from the history of Dr. Fu-Manchu, both things to use for your own evil genius and things not to use (any longer or at all). The Devil Doctor, the Lord of Strange Deaths (both names attributed to Fu-Manchu) is still hovering over evil geniuses today, no matter how often he supposedly has died.