Book Review: The Leopard Couch by Sax Rohmer

As a teen, I went through a heavy Sax Rohmer period, eagerly plowing through anything I could by the British thriller writer. The mid- to late-sixties was a good time for his fans. Spurred, in part, by the success of Ian Fleming (whose Dr. No itself owed a considerable debt to Rohmer), his books saw a paperback revival in the states. Read every one of the Pyramid reprints that showed up on the paperback racks and was so taken with ‘em that I even wrote a play parodying Rohmer’s most famous creation for a high school English class.

His biggest series character was Dr. Fu Manchu, who first appeared in 1912 and reappeared in 12 more novels up to Rohmer’s death in 1959. Back in the sixties, the books made for crackling inventive entertainments, though their racist underpinnings--Rohmer’s villain embodied Anglo culture’s fears of the Yellow Peril--prove somewhat of a hindrance today. Rohmer wasn’t the only thriller writer of this early twentieth century to pander to xenophobia, of course, though his foremost creation is arguably one of the best-known personifications of white reader paranoia.

Fortunately for those of us who retain a nostalgic fondness for the writers of our youth, the prolific Rohmer produced a slew of other genre pieces that didn’t key into Fear of a Yellow Planet. The pulp revivalists at Black Dog Books have just released their second collection of the man’s short stories, The Leopard Couch: and Other Stories of the Fantastic and Supernatural that collects some of these lesser-known works, several of which have not seen prior printing in the U.S. Gathering twelve independent tales, plus a self-contained section of Rohmer’s supernatural novel Brood of the Witch Queen, the book provides a pleasurably moody selection of period fantasy along with the occasional traditional old school murder mystery.

The set opens with its title tale, a fantasy of an Egyptian couch that takes its narrator on a Lovecraftian dream trip to witness the punishment of an Egyptian priestess and her lover. Egypt and other exotic locales like Burma figure prominently in many of the stories here, and Rohmer effectively plays his settings for all their atmospheric different-ness. Even those London bound fictions, like the Morris Klaw mystery “The Tragedies in the Greek Room,” typically connect to other lands and earlier times--in this case, a poisoned harp with ties to Lucretia Borgia. In “The Red Eye of Vishnu,” the ruthless and alluring seductress Madame di Medici (who also appears in the Egypt set “The Haunted Temple”) appears in London to retrieve a ruby eye stolen from a temple statue. Who needs Oriental masterminds when you’ve got sexy femme fatales?

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is a Books editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy comic fat acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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