In his first Father Brown story, 'The Blue Cross', published in 1910, G.K. Chesterton introduced a 'colossus of crime' who seemed to have strayed in from Comic Cuts: a giant Gascon called Flambeau who planted dummy pillar boxes in quiet suburbs in the hope of catching the odd postal order, and who ran a fraudulent dairy company without benefit of cows, his agents merely moving the milk containers outside other people's doors to the doors of his own customers. Was Chesterton, perhaps, making mock of Professor Moriarty, the 'Napoleon of crime' whose empire was not without its Comic Cuts aspects? Neither Flambeau nor Moriarty had anything like the reach or the ambition, of Dr Fu Manchu, the 'archangel of evil' who controlled the underworlds and fanatical sects of four continents and was out for world domination. The filmy-eyed mandarin, who surfaced on the bookstalls in 1913, was described by his creator, Sax Rohmer, as 'the Yellow Peril incarnate in one man'.

LRB 4 September 1997 | PDF Download