The driving force behind this spectacle was British Harry Alan Towers. This exuberant producer, born 1920, had established with his mother, Margaret Miller Towers, a company called Towers of London before he was even thirty.

Bustlingly busy, they produced radio plays and episodes for television serials. Their motto was “minimal input – maximum output.”

Towers had just embarked upon his conquest of the movie theatres – so the agile Super Villain came just in time! (I'm sure the almost ninety-year old wouldn't just remember all the titles of his over 100 motion pictures without drawing on crib notes).

Towers acquired the film rights to the collected works of author Sax Rohmer even before making his first Fu Man Chu movie. His main intention was to claim the names Fu Manchu and Sax Rohmer. Under the pseudonym Peter Welbeck, he wrote the scripts for all five films himself. Finally, he ended up using only a few themes, characters and relicts from the stories. Not even the title of the film, The Face of Fu Man Chu, exists as a book title. But who cares?

In a video interview, that he commissioned to scavenge for new partners and scour for fresh money, Towers candidly revealed the secret ingredients: “A good deal should be presold by the authors name, the title and the stars. That’s an enormous help“.

Sax Rohmer, the nom de plume of Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward (1883 - 1959), was prolific and Towers was surely impressed by him. He did not only write thirteen books about Fu Manchu and other cliffhangers, but also comedy sketches, scripts in a local patois and composed songs as well.  He worked as a journalist, furthermore as a ghost writer. Obviously yearning for a big financial success such as Arthur Conan Doyle's with Sherlock Holmes.

No wonder that his heroes, Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie, are the poor man’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Their names are even rhythmidentical.

Like Watson, Dr. Petrie narrates the adventures, at least in the early episodes. Smith too is called when it gets fiddly, smokes a pipe and beholds at once at the scene of the crime, previously overlooked. Murder happens - surely in closed rooms. Elementary! No sign of the culprit. Documents vanish out of vaults. It is clear that Smith and Petrie come from the same neighbourhood as Doyle's duo, and could immediately move to 21 A Baker Street.

Fu-Manchu himself, the anti-hero, is described by Rohmer as "cool, superior and malevolent". His face, that of an archangel of evil, was “wholly dominated by the most uncanny eyes that ever reflected a human soul.” The green-eyed one is a worldly well-educated genius of the natural sciences, an initiate of mystical cults.

He is tall and slim, his hands long and bony, as we know him from the films.  But – he is bald and beardless, despite having his trademark moustache named Fu Manchu in his honour.