The Fu Manchu stories sound like a lot of fun, and I see that PG has a few, so I will check them out.

One of the reasons I love the Sax Rohmer Fu Manchu shorties is that Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie, the heroes, are soooo dumb. They’re very serious and they think of themselves as being much brighter than they actually are. In most of the stories they manage to stymie Fu without ever fully grasping all of what he was up to; they win by realizing something is important to Fu (without necessarily knowing why) and keeping it from him, or causing him some sort of professional embarrassment that shames him into withdrawing. I think the virulent “yellow peril” racism of the stories is easier to take because it largely manifests as Fu being both vastly more competent and far more honorable than his white opponents, and he loses not because he’s foolish, but because Smith is such a bonehead that he gets in the way of Fu’s clockwork schemes.