Born Arthur Henry Ward in 1883, Sax Rohmer was four years old when Sherlock Holmes appeared in print. A journalist, poet, comedy sketch writer, and songwriter, he turned to fiction, and the first Fu-Manchu story, The Zayat Kiss, appeared in The Story-Teller magazine in October, 1912. That story became the beginning of the novel The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, and fourteen more followed, making Rohmer one of the most successful novelists of the 1920s and 1930s. Fu-Manchu has been featured in radio, television, comic strips, and comic books. In film he has been portrayed by such actors as Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, John Carradine, Peter Sellers, and Nicolas Cage. Rohmer died in 1959, a victim of an outbreak of the type A influenza known as the Asian flu.