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Fire-Tongue Review

Written early in his career, Fire-Tongue is one of Rohmer's best and, in this reviewer's opinion, even better than his Fu Manchu series. Though this story is the sequel to Bat Wing, it is not necessary to have read the earlier book to enjoy the story and characters in Fire Tongue.

The story contains several characters: Paul Harley, an independent investigator; Nicol Brinn, a renowned world adventurer, and Philomena Abingdon, an English beauty whose father dies under mysterious circumstances.

This pulp mystery combines them and several other characters into the strange world of Fire-Tongue that may be the name of a cult, the name of a prophesied Zoroastrian god-messiah, or simply a cold-blooded assassin.

Or maybe all three.

In spite of its abrupt ending and its glossing over of some dramatic moments that this reviewer believes Rohmer should have embellished, Fire-Tongue is well worth the time if you like pulp mysteries. However, be aware that the racist and sexist overtones, common for the day in which the novel was written, may be offensive to some.

Fire-Tongue Overview

The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Fiction / Action

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Customer Reviews

I Love Sax Rohmer! - D. Harrison - GA, USA
I might be a bit biased in my review because I absolutely love Sax Rohmer!

I found this book to be just as enjoyable as his Fu-Manchu books (but Brood of the Witch Queen is still my favorite).

As mentioned earlier, make sure you check out the edition you are buying (this goes for all classic books).

I am reviewing a Kindle version of the book (ASIN: B003YUC894)

Check the edition and publisher carefully before you buy... - Kiwi - Mississauga, Ontario Canada
Sax Rohmer's books are great, enjoyed them a lot when I was a kid. However, when you're buying, check the edition and publisher carefully before you close the deal. The version of "Fire-Tongue" published by General Books LLC is a poor quality, automated reproduction with no index, no illustrations and quite a number of typos. The "Look Inside" is for another publisher's imprint of the book, which is a prfessionally edited version, unlike the General Books LLC version.

To quote here and there from the publishers web site, which I took a look at:
"We created your book using OCR software that includes an automated spell check. Our OCR software is 99 percent accurate if the book is in good condition. However, with up to 3,500 characters per page, even one percent can be an annoying number of typos....... After we re-typeset and designed your book, the page numbers change so the old index and table of contents no longer work. Therefore, we usually remove them. Since many of our books only sell a couple of copies, manually creating a new index and table of contents could add more than a hundred dollars to the cover price....

....Our OCR software can't distinguish between an illustration and a smudge or library stamp so it ignores everything except type. We would really like to manually scan and add the illustrations. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies....

....We created your book using a robot who turned and photographed each page. Our robot is 99 percent accurate. But sometimes two pages stick together. And sometimes a page may even be missing from our copy of the book. We would really like to manually scan each page and buy multiple copies of each original. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies....."

You get the general idea by now. Unfortunately, these low quality reproductions (450,000 listed under General Books LLC) have the reviews associated with the original or with better quality imprints associated with them. The product description is totally misleading for the buyer that's not aware of this publisher.

IMHO this is unethical marketing. Anyways, your decision. But at least you know more about General Books LLC (also, be aware that there are quite a number of publishers now doing this - so if you're buying an older book, it really pays to check the publisher carefully - and quite often, a hint that all is not what it seems is the cover - these el cheapo scam publishers usually don't bother with book cover art related to the actual content).

Sax Rohmer mystery - bicar - Wisconsin
I'm not familiar with Sax Rohmer (Fu Manchu never attracted me) but I recently read one of his ebooks and liked it enough I thought I would try another. He is a very good wordsmith but the story was a little hard for me to get into. I'd try another one though.

Not his best work, in several ways - T. Simons - Columbia, SC United States
I read this after having burned through a number of other Sax Rohmer ebooks, and it wasn't my favorite at all; I much preferred his Fu Manchu novels.

The story is standard pulp fare -- detective, mysterious murder, dark secrets, enigmatic villain, beautiful ingenue, etc. So far, so good. Like other Rohmer books, there are some elements which presage the Indiana Jones movies (especially, here, Temple of Doom).

This particular pulp potboiler has several problems, though.

1) The writing is comically bad. The keynote might have been when the protagonist declares this the "biggest case of my career" when we have literally no idea who the villain might be, but there were many other sharp contenders (an honorable mention must go, for example, to "You are out after one of the big heads of the crook world").

2) the plotting is painfully predictable. When an elderly man visits the protagonist, announces he thinks people are trying to kill him, begs for assistance, and then decides to tell Our Hero about it all later that day, over dinner, instead of, you know, right then in his office like he came there to do. . .yeah. We all know about how long that guy's going to live (exactly long enough to choke out an Enigmatic Phrase over the soup). By itself, that kind of thing wouldn't be so bad, but, well, there's another problem:

3) The misogyny and racism. The best example of this work's misogyny might be this two-line exchange between the protagonist and the ingenue: ""Why do you insist on treating me like a child?"/"Perhaps because I enjoy doing so". The real kicker, though, is the books' casual racism; lines like "The manicurist incident indicated an inherent cruelty only possible in one of the Oriental race" are all too common, and whenever the heroes take an oath it's "on [their] honor as a white man," etc. On the one single occasion where a caucasian does something reprehensible, the narrator takes care to note "the prominence of upper jaw singularly reminiscent of the primitive Briton . . . utter stupidity and dogged courage are the outstanding characteristics of this type."

It's possible to defend that sort of thing by saying Rohmer was a creature of his era, but even at the time he was writing, Rohmer was decried for the rampant racism in his books; one of the later Fu Manchu novels, published shortly before WW2, features the protagonists attempting to save a Hitler analogue and thereby foil Fu Manchu's plot to prevent a world race war.

Regardless, though, for a modern reader, this kind of thing is fairly painful to read. In his Fu Manchu novels, it's worth working past the racism just to read the iconic descriptions of the Fu Manchu character. Here, though . . . well, there's no Fu Manchu here, and without that iconic character, what's left is just racist pulp. Skip this one, and grab the Fu Manchu series instead.

*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Oct 28, 2010 11:45:05

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Thursday, October 28, 2010