Tales of Chinatown

Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, better known as Sax Rohmer, was a prolific English novelist. He is most remembered for his series of novels featuring the master criminal Dr. Fu Manchu. His first published work was in 1903, the short story "The Mysterious Mummy" for Pearson's Weekly. He published his first novel -- Pause! -- anonymously in 1910 and the first Fu Manchu story, "The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu," was serialized over 1912-13. The Fu Manchu stories, together with those featuring Gaston Max or Morris Klaw, made Rohmer one of the most successful and well-paid writers in of the 1920s and 1930s.

Tales of Chinatown is a collection of ten stories by Rohmer. Rohmer's stories take place in the Limehouse, a section of London containing Chinatown. Rohmer's Chinatown is full of the mystery and menace of the East. "The superficial inquirer comes away convinced that the romance of the Asiatic district has no existence outside the imaginations of writers of fiction. Yet here lies a secret quarter, as secret and as strange, in its smaller way, as its parent in China which is called the Purple Forbidden City." In the Limehouse you'll find crime, drugs, and Chief Inspector Red Kerry, struggling to keep a lid on this particular pot.