Agatha Christie’s The Big Four & Li Chang Yen

Agatha Christie’s 1927 novel The Big Four is her only novel that steps outside the country house style genre (or essentially country houses put on the Orient Express or up the Nile) and works within the mysterious super villain genre. It’s a Hercule Poirot book but with a bit more action and daring-do than we’re used to by the fusty old Belgian. It’s an amalgam of four shorter stories Christie wrote for The Sketch. The Big Four are led by Chinese villain Li Chang Yen who bears a remarkable resemblance in description and action to Sax Rohmer’s far better known Fu Manchu. Li Chang Yen is often described as “Fu-Manchu-esque” but in 1927 only three Fu Manchu novels had been published and he was far from becoming the Yellow Peril phenomenon he has since. However, in Fu-Manchu-esque style we do get Limehouse dope dens and dark “Oriental” streets in the heart of the Empire’s capital. We are in, as The Observer review of the time noted, an East End ‘hung with rich Oriental silks’.

Anyway, this cover crossed my screen the other day and looked interesting and does, coming later than 1927 obviously, overtly seem to mimic Fu Manchu to attract readers attention.