Grove Koger

June 1 is the anniversary of the death of Arthur Henry Ward (1883-1959), who wrote a number of once-popular novels and stories under the pseudonym Sax Rohmer. His most famous series involved Fu Manchu, a Chinese doctor engaged in a never-ending struggle against Western imperialism. But Rohmer also wrote several works set in Egypt or dealing with devious (and sometimes supernatural) Egyptian designs on England and its institutions.

Rohmer can be seen as a late entry in a category that literary critics have identified as Imperial Gothic. In the words of Suzanne Daly, the category involves “late 19th-century fiction set in the British Empire that employs and adapts elements drawn from Gothic novels such as a gloomy, forbidding atmosphere; brutal, tyrannical men; spectacular forms of violence or punishment; and the presence of the occult or the supernatural.” Among other examples, Daly refers to H. Rider Haggard’s famous 1887 novel She and Bram Stoker’s influential 1897 horror classic Dracula.

Daly also mentions an astonishingly bad 1897 novel set in London and Egypt that few will have heard of—The Beetle, by Richard Marsh. I once tried to read it but abandoned the effort halfway through, as it’s written in a breathless, hysterical style that suggests that its author would have profited from the attentions of a psychologist. Slightly better are several other examples of Imperial Gothic with an Egyptian flavor, including Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian (1899). Here an “undead” Egyptian priest intones an ominous warning: “Ah, my nineteenth-century friend, your father stole me from the land of my birth, and from the resting-place the gods decreed for me; but beware, for retribution is pursuing you, and is even now close upon your heels.” That’s pretty good, but on the whole, Boothby writes suffocatingly padded prose. Another little-known novel that belongs here is Stoker’s own Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), which I actually finished a few months ago, scarcely believing that the author of the intensely dramatic Dracula could have produced such a static narrative.

These three deservedly forgotten novels capitalize on a recurring fascination with things Egyptian on the part of Britons. This Egyptomania, as it’s been called, washed ashore in several substantial waves. One followed the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869—an event that established a lifeline between Britain and the “jewel” in its imperial crown, India. Paradoxically enough, however, the event led in turn to a wave of anxiety over the very vulnerability of that lifeline, one centered on the “mysterious” land through which the Canal passed. Another wave of Egyptomania followed the 1922 discovery of Pharaoh Tutankhamen’s tomb.

Having surveyed the obvious contenders, I think I’m safe in saying that Rohmer’s works involving Egypt constitute the late high point of Egyptomanial Imperial Gothic. His characterization was seldom more than facile and his actual knowledge of the country seems to have been haphazard, but he was fascinated by Egypt and visited it several times, on the first occasion with his bride in 1913. The couple made the acquaintance of Egyptologist Rex Engelbach, who in turn helped them inspect the burial chamber of the step pyramid of Meidum. The Rohmers also visited a number of better-known sites, including Luxor and the Great Pyramid.

The best of Rohmer’s Egyptian works is the 1918 novel Brood of the Witch Queen. Here a reincarnation of an immortal being, the Witch Queen of the title, has taken up residence in the heart of London. Thwarting him are “tall, thin Scotsman” Robert Cairn, who undergoes what his father, a learned doctor, refers to as a “saturnalia of horror” involving a clutch of carrion-eating Dermestes beetles (Dermestidae spp.) taken from the skull of a mummy. The ordeal results in Robert’s heading to—wouldn’t you know it!—Cairo for a “rest-cure.” As it turns out, however, a “thing very evil,” as a fortune teller puts it, has entered the city before him. In Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (Paladin, 1977), Les Daniels praised Brood, noting that “Rohmer’s occult lore was never as well employed as in this tale … and he never equalled the claustrophobic chills of the scenes in the bowels of a pyramid.” David Huckvale described the novel as “gloriously lurid” in his study Ancient Egypt in the Popular Imagination (McFarland, 2012).

Other works by Rohmer that can be considered in this category include the collection Tales of Secret Egypt (1918); The Daughter of Fu Manchu (1931), which deals with the apparent death of a distinguished archaeologist at the Tomb of the Black Ape in the Valley of the Kings; and The Bat Flies Low (1935), which involves an ancient Egyptian lamp that functions without any obvious source of energy—an artifact based on “knowledge for which the world is not yet ready.” How Rohmer must have grinned when he wrote that phrase!

The only substantial biography of Rohmer is Master of Villainy, by Cay Van Ash and Rohmer’s widow, Elizabeth Sax Rohmer (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972). Although not reliable, it has a personal significance for me, as my first wife and I had stopped over in Bowling Green to visit an aunt and uncle of mine on our way to Europe. Thus I was able to buy a copy in the university bookstore shortly after it was published. More authoritative but less fun is Lord of Strange Deaths (Strange Attractor, 2015) a collection of essays edited by Phil Baker and Antony Clayton.

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