Fu Manchu – Sax Rohmer
Dr Fu-Manchu. The sinister doctor was created by Sax Rohmer and appeared in over a dozen novels and feature films in the first half of the last century, rivalling Sherlock Holmes in popularity.
Sax Rohmer was the pen name of Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward born in Birmingham in 1883. In 1912 he published The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu about the Chinese criminal mastermind and his ambitions for world domination. Rohmer’s hero was Nayland Smith, a less cerebral equivalent of Holmes, lately returned from Burma, and his narrator, and equivalent of Watson, was Dr Petrie.
In The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu, the first work in the series, Rohmer refers to Dr Petrie’s house which faces a ‘malevolent common’ in south-west London. The area which is ‘not too remote’ connects with central London by a tramline that runs in front of the house and a tube station to Charing Cross is nearby. The building faces the south side of a relatively large common with clumps of elms and other trees, crossed by paths lit by night and with at least one pond called ‘Mound’ pond. On the north side is an edifice with a clock sufficiently large for its chimes to be heard by Petrie. The only street in the area to be mentioned by name is called Rectory Grove which, he says, is off the north side of the common. (The real Rectory Grove is some way from Clapham Common.)
Sax Rohmer was familiar with Clapham, he met his future wife Rose Elizabeth Knox on Clapham Common whilst strolling there on a spring evening in 1905. Even allowing for poetic licence the clues all point to Dr Petrie’s practice being on Clapham Common South Side but precisely where?