He worked as a poet, songwriter and comedy sketch writer for music hall performers before creating the Sax Rohmer persona and pursuing a career writing fiction.

[citation needed] Like his contemporaries Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, Rohmer claimed membership to one of the factions of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

[2] He gradually transitioned from writing for music hall performers to concentrating on short stories and serials for magazine publication.

After penning Little Tich in 1911 (as ghostwriter for the music hall entertainer of the same name) he wrote the first Fu Manchu novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, first published in a serialisation from October 1912 to June 1913.

It was an immediate success, with its story of Denis Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie facing the supposed worldwide conspiracy of the "Yellow Peril".

Rohmer believed that conditions for launching a Chinese villain were ideal because the Boxer Rebellion had "started off rumors of a Yellow Peril which had not yet died down.

He kept Head Centre as a female criminal mastermind to combat Drake Roscoe, but was very unhappy with the book both as it started and in its finished form.

In the meantime, he tried again to focus his energies on what was first titled Fu Manchu's Daughter for Collier's in 1930, but with an older (now knighted) Denis Nayland Smith as the protagonist once more.

[2] Colin Watson commented: "So vehement and repetitive were Sax Rohmer's references to Asiatic plotting against 'white' civilisation that they cannot be explained simply as the frills of melodramatic narration.

There are no Oriental villains or exotic locations; rather, there are gentle rabbits and lambs in pastoral settings and a great deal of philosophical musing.

The departure from his expected subject matter is plainly signalled by the book's dedication: "To the slaves of the pomegranate, sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, who drink at the fountain of life, this chalice is offered as a loving-cup".

[citation needed] Tales of Chinatown (1922) is a collection of 10 short stories published in hardcover by Cassell in 1922 and Doubleday, Page and Company in 1922.