West is East

Nayland Smith's Sinophobia and Sax Rohmer's Bank balance

Clive Bloom

pp. 22-36

in: Clive Bloom (ed), Twentieth-century suspense, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1990

Abstract

It is commonplace nowadays to note the inherent racism of English fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century. Sapper, Dornford Yates, John Buchan, Edgar Wallace and many others are targeted as the promulgators of a fearsome and totally irrational hatred of all things foreign. For them the Black, the Chinese, the Argentine, the Levantine and the Jew become sinister "niggers", "chinks", "dagos", "greasy levantines' and "oily Jews". The race hatred of these authors employs a feverish conjunctivity, with oily Jews who are both capitalists and "bolsheviks", or Chinese who are mandarin warlords and opium den keepers in Limehouse. Moreover, when not acting themselves these essentially cowardly folk employ peculiarly simian dacoits or things of a polyglot and nauseous origin.