Limehouse, Dope, Bright Young Things and Sax Rohmer

Most people know Sax Rohmer (left) for his Fu Manchu Yellow Peril novels which were made into numerous B movies in Britain and America. He’s definitely out of fashion these days and seen as hopelessly politically incorrect, not without reason. Still, I recently downloaded and read a copy of Rohmer’s 1919 novel Dope: A Story of Chinatown (it’s now more often titled ‘A True Story of Drug Trafficking’ – there’s a nice cheap Kindle edition here but if you don’t mind some scrappy text there are free downloads around on the Internet – it’s long out of copyright). It’s not a Fu Manchu novel, but the first book featuring another of Rohmer’s serial characters, Chief Inspector Red Kerry – tough, precise, heading home to his loving and clairvoyant wife in Brixton at the end of a case and fiercely Catholic for some reason!

Dope is actually a pretty good read (though there’s plenty of racial stereotyping and Chinese devilness in Limehouse too) but I think it does actually chime in quite nicely with a lot of the atmosphere around London’s West End at the time that is covered in far more recent non-fiction books such as Marek Kohn’s Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground and DJ Taylor’s  Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940 (which I just read by the way). Coming in 1919, really before the whole post Great War flapper/slapper/dope and debauch thing really got going I personally found Dope quite prescient in parts where Rohmer describes the West End swells taste for drugs. However, his Limehouse is still over-exoticised – trap doors and underground opium lairs are a bit excitable! Btu for a flavour of the time and one of the first anti-opium, blame it on the Chinese in the East End screeds this is worth a read.