Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History
Page 11
He could hardly have known that I grew up in a rural village in southeastern China, and even though I went to China’s foremost university, that would not, in many American eyes, really count. After I came to the United States, the cycle seemed to repeat, as I started almost from scratch in Tuscaloosa. I am one of those against whom Henry James, the old gentleman’s favorite author, once warned in his 1905 Bryn Mawr College commencement speech—those immigrants who came to this country, sat up all night, worked mindlessly, and then played to their hearts’ content with the English language. The fact that I was assigning my Harvard undergraduates to read Gertrude Stein—“a horrible prose writer,” as the old gentleman sniffed—was perhaps proof enough of my poor taste and the sad state of Harvard education. As for other authors whose work I taught in my classes, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Theresa Cha, and Leslie Marmon Silko, he had either never heard of them or would not, as he remarked with polite nonchalance, “consider them as worthy of studying.”
James’s friend, Henry Adams, whose classic autobiography reveals, among other things, how a Harvard education failed to prepare him for new problems in American culture, put his finger on the issue when he described a scene of symbolic confrontation between immigrant upstarts and people of entitlement like himself. Returning in 1868 from Britain, where he had gone to avoid fighting in the Civil War, Adams, upon witnessing the influx of immigrants at the docks in New York City, described his feelings this way:
One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the last ten years had given to the great mechanical energies—coal, iron, steam—a distinct superiority in power over the old industrial elements—agriculture, handwork, and learning—but the result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties resembled the action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain, to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his own trail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belated reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold’s. His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow—not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs—but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he—American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war.4
Just as James was alarmed by the mongrel crowds of dagos, Danes, Irish, and the like, Adams felt defeated by the hordes of Yiddish-sputtering Eastern European Jews who seemed much more energetic and instinctual than he, “American of Americans,” who surely ought to be entitled to the leadership and hence championship in the game of life.
On that particular day at the Signet clubhouse, I felt neither humiliated nor proud in front of that old gentleman, “S—P—, ’57.” I was actually thinking about Earl Biggers, an author I had then just started researching. I wondered how Biggers, a so-called rube from Ohio, felt when he first stepped in the club that eventually elected him an honorary member in 1908, a year after his graduation. Biggers, a small-town midwesterner whose parents had had to borrow money to send him to college, had to climb the social ladder through sweat and toil, unlike the two blue-blooded Henrys.
The lunch was delicious, like most Harvard meals, until they get repetitious and tiresome. Garden salad, grilled salmon, scented rice, and broccoli that was always a bit overcooked. And the conversations continued to be polite and jolly, like well-polished English prose.
12
The Raconteur
EARL DERR BIGGERS, CIRCA 1907 (Courtesy of Lilly Library, Indiana University)
Boston, a city most cultivated, where much more English words are put to employment than are accustomed [in Honolulu].
—Charlie Chan1
A YOUNG BUCKEYE boasting no family wealth or connection, Earl Biggers went through ups and downs in his immediate post-Harvard career. His first job was as a night police reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a regional newspaper that he had read every morning while growing up in nearby Warren. He did not last long at the job, however: he was a better storyteller than a journalist. The newspaper, said the editor, had no room for “a reporter who embroiders fiction out of facts,” especially when the facts were police matters.2
After another brief stint as a manuscript reader for the Indianapolis-based Bobbs-Merrill Company, which would later become his publisher, Biggers returned to New England in February 1908 and worked for the Boston Traveler. His daily column, improbably titled “The Fact Is,” contained humorous absurdities, sharp-tongued opinions, and sarcastic doggerel. In one of the columns, he penned what he called a “lyrical roast,” a stinging review of current “worst bestsellers”:
Peter de Puyster Blottingplad,
Who wrote “Marie, the Subtle Sinner,”
Does his best work when he has had
Plenty of artichokes for dinner.
Mabel Redink, the “girl Dumas,”
Who mingles history with fiction,
Reads books on corporation law
In order to improve her diction.
Samuel Gray, who’s all the rage,
Because he has convulsed the nation,
Spends hours before a monkey’s cage
Gathering loads of inspiration.
Thus is our sadness put to rout
By publishers—kind gloom dispellers—
Who send us cheery news about
The folks who write the worst bestsellers.
These Alice-in-Wonderland–like rhymes are followed by odds and ends of ordinary absurdities accompanied by deadpan witticisms:
A Brooklyn man ate a beer glass—which no doubt proved food for reflection.
Six playing cards on a plain board mark a grave in Arizona. Doubtless by this time the late lamented realizes the error of holding more than five cards in a poker game.
“The Good Old Ways”—It gives us great joy to note that a citizen of Mingo, Okla., whipped out his trusty six-shooter the other day and shot the mustache off another citizen. The good old ways are too seldom practiced for the inspiration of the “deadeye Dick” school of fictionists. We sincerely hope that the gentleman who lost the mustache appreciated the fact that he had a mighty close shave.3
These humorous punch lines were undoubtedly great practice for Biggers’s later work on Charlie Chan novels, in which the wisecracking detective charms readers with such rat-a-tat one-liners as “Truth, like football—receive many kicks before reaching goal,” “Some heads, like hard nuts, much better if well cracked,” and “Every maybe has a wife called Maybe-Not.” A famed raconteur among his friends and associates, Biggers took whimsical pleasure in running the humor column, a job he compared to making faces in church. “It wasn’t fun,” he said, “and it offended a lot of very nice people.”4
The same went for his next job as the drama critic at the paper. His lampooning reviews annoyed many theater owners and producers, who demanded he be fired. The axe eventually fell on a snowy night in January 1912. Coming back to Boston after a Christmas visit in Warren, Biggers learned that the newspaper had been sold. The editor handed him a cigar.
“What does this mean?” asked Biggers. “Was I fired last Saturday, or is it next week?”
The editor, who had been trying to protect him but had now failed with the new owners of the paper, told him that it was last Saturday.5
Walking out of the office and into a blizzard, Biggers was wearing an elegant fur-lined coat with a handsome raccoon collar, which he had just bought on the installment plan.
“I didn’t have a job,” as he recalled later in a mock interview with a parrot on the eve of publication of his second Charlie Chan book, The Chinese Parrot, “but I had the coat.”6
Indeed, Biggers had even more ambitious personal plans: he was contemplating marrying Eleanor Ladd, a New Englander who wrote columns for the Boston Traveler under the pseudonym of Phoebe Dwight.
Back in his room at Mount Vernon Place, a Harvard graduate with no immediate prospects of emplo
yment yet with a bride in the offing, Biggers knew he had to earn his living somehow. So he sat down near the coal grate and started to write his first book, Seven Keys to Baldpate. Like many authors who are quite particular about how and where they write—Truman Capote wrote lying down, with a typewriter and a cigarette and coffee; Gertrude Stein wrote behind the wheel of her Ford Model T; and Vladimir Nabokov wrote standing up and on index cards—Biggers had his own eccentricities. He liked writing with moonlight streaming in through the casement (one wonders now if he only wrote when the moon was out) and a sack of peanut brittle at his elbow. Working at a pace of one chapter a day, and rewriting at the same speed, Biggers was no procrastinator: he finished the mystery novel in less than three months. Two weeks later, Bobbs-Merrill, where he had once worked and had befriended editor David Laurance Chambers, agreed to publish the book.7
Set in a deserted summer mountain resort in the dead of winter, Seven Keys to Baldpate involves an author, Billy Magee, who seeks peace and quiet in order to write his next book. Up to this point, Magee has been a successful writer of popular literature, “the sort of novels sold by the pound in the department stores…wild thrilling tales for the tired businessman’s tired wife—shots in the night, chases after fortunes. Cupid busy with his arrows all over the place! It’s good fun, and I like to do it. There’s money in it.”
“But now and then,” Magee confesses, “I get a longing to do something that will make critics sit up—the real thing…. Now I’m going to go up to Baldpate Inn and think. I’m going to get away from melodrama. I’m going to do a novel so fine and literary that Henry Cabot Lodge will come to me with tears in his eyes and ask me to join his bunch of self-made Immortals.”8
The reference to Lodge, one of Harvard’s most famous graduates, a symbol of the upper echelon of American culture in the early twentieth century, represents a dilemma that would dog Biggers throughout his writing career. As much as he claimed to prefer popular literature to the classics, despite his evident knack for pulp or popular writing, Biggers also wanted to be a “serious” writer. In his twenty-fifth Harvard class-reunion report, the then-famous author admitted, “I am quite sure that I never intended to travel the road of the mystery writer.”9
In Seven Keys to Baldpate, Magee is merely a mouthpiece for his creator, who at this time was forced by necessity to write nothing but a novel that would be sold by the pound in the department stores and newsstands. And the mystery at Baldpate Inn is the kind of thrilling tale that its protagonist ostensibly tries to avoid writing: explosions in the dark, a large fortune sought after by dueling parties, love at first sight, secrets buried in the bosom of time—all the ingredients for concocting a fantastic melodrama. But this proved lucrative, providing enough money to enable Biggers, with an advance from Bobbs-Merrill, not only to keep the fur coat on his back but also to marry Eleanor Ladd and move to a posh neighborhood in Pelham Manor, just outside of New York.
“What saved my life and my coat,” as Biggers confessed to the interrogating parrot, “was Seven Keys to Baldpate!”10
On the day of his debut novel’s publication in 1913, the Boston Herald published an article, “Earl Derr Biggers Now a Real Novelist,” which contains a piece of Biggersian doggerel in honor of the former humor columnist, the famed Boston raconteur:
Biggers, once dramatic critic,
Without the usual fetters,
Has just earned the title
Of, “Jack-of-all letters.”
A poet, critic, humorist,
And writer of short stories,
His novel which has just appeared,
Has dimmed his other glories.
The book has humor, love and strife,
But one above all deserves the prize,
A character that’s drawn from life
She is not hard to recognize.11
Anticipating the golden age of the American mystery, Seven Keys to Baldpate, which predates S. S. Van Dine’s The Benson Murder Case (1926) by more than a decade, was an instant success. Reviews were glowing, as exemplified by the one in the New York Times: “The brilliant way in which Mr. Biggers has written this, his first novel, gives promise of excellent things to come in his career as a novelist.”12 Dramatic rights were acquired by George M. Cohan, who produced the play on Broadway for a 320-performance run. At least seven film adaptations of the novel were subsequently released, making Biggers a nationally known author.13 But these “fifteen minutes of glory” were no comparison to the lasting fame that Charlie Chan would bring him.
13
The House Without a Key
J. A. GILMAN RESIDENCE, HONOLULU, 1908. THE HOUSE WAS PART OF THE HOTEL RUN BY MRS. LA VANCHA GRAY IN THE 1920S (Photo by L. E. Edgeworth, courtesy of Bishop Museum)
In an obscure corner of an inside page, I found an item to the effect that a certain hapless Chinese, being too fond of opium, had been arrested by Sergeants Chang Apana and Lee Fook, of the Honolulu Police. So Sergeant Charlie Chan entered the story of The House Without a Key.
—E. D. Biggers
AFTER THE SUCCESS of Seven Keys to Baldpate, Earl Biggers continued to produce at a rapid pace. In addition to writing short stories for the Saturday Evening Post, the American Magazine, and the Ladies’ Home Journal, he also published Love Insurance, a romantic farce, in 1914, as well as Inside the Line, a play. The Agony Column, a novella, quickly followed in 1916. Particularly during the last part of that decade, he concentrated on drama and collaborated with a number of Broadway and Hollywood producers. “At one point,” according to his biographer Barbara Gregorich, “Biggers was writing and rewriting two plays a day, attending rehearsals for one in the morning, the other in the afternoon.”1 Such a frantic pace wreaked havoc with his health, resulting in a doctor’s recommendation of a long, therapeutic vacation, which took him to the sandy white beaches of Waikiki.
Biggers arrived in Hawaii in April 1920, at a time when narcotic arrests and police graft scandals were making daily headlines in Honolulu newspapers. Standing at the crossroads of the Orient and the United States, Hawaii was then a major transit point as well as a destination for opium traffic. According to an article published in the Honolulu Advertiser, dope traffic had the islands in its “horrid grip.” By 1924, an estimated two thousand addicts in Hawaii were spending $6,000,000 a year on opium.2
“Officers Seize Opium; Arrest Two Japanese,” screamed one headline in the Advertiser on March 9, 1920. In this bust, federal agents confiscated $7,200 worth of opium. On April 7, Arthur McDuffie’s team uncovered another opium store and found eight tins of narcotics in a garage. But the biggest headline of those spring months was the arrest of Moses Needham, captain of police in Honolulu, for failure to report opium confiscation. According to an Advertiser article on March 23,
Captain of Police Moses Needham was arrested at 3 o’clock yesterday afternoon on Alakea Street by United States Marshal J. J. Smiddy on a warrant which charges that on the evening of February 29 he took from a Chinese six tins of opium and $211 in cash and failed to make a report of the matter to the headquarters. Needham’s bond was fixed at $1,000 and he was released from custody at 3:45 o’clock yesterday afternoon at the marshal’s office.3
These news stories clearly made an indelible impression on Biggers, who was relaxing his nerves under the tropical shade in Waikiki: his first Charlie Chan novel, The House Without a Key, involves opium trafficking on the islands. Biggers stayed for three months at one of the cottages run by Mrs. La Vancha Maria Chapin Gray on the beachfront that still bears her name—Gray’s Beach. When he first checked in, Biggers asked for the key to the cottage. “What key?” retorted Mrs. Gray. In those days, no one in Waikiki would lock their doors. That brief exchange—culture shock for a Bostonian—would eventually inspire the title of the first Chan book.
Biggers was sitting on the lanai of the cottage one evening. A tropical scene of “semi-barbaric beauty” unfolded in front of him that he would later immortalize at the very beginning of The House:
It was the hour at which [Miss Minerva Winterslip] liked Waikiki best, the hour just preceding dinner and the quick tropic darkness. The shadows cast by the tall cocoanut palms lengthened and deepened, the light of the falling sun flamed on Diamond Head and tinted with gold the rollers sweeping in from the coral reef. A few late swimmers, reluctant to depart, dotted those waters whose touch is like the caress of a lover. On the springboard of the nearest float a slim brown girl poised for one delectable instant. What a figure!…Like an arrow the slender figure rose, then fell; the perfect dive, silent and clean.4
A strong swimmer who can make a silent, clean dive turns out to be the novel’s cunning killer. As the crepuscular light faded in front of his lanai, Biggers saw the looming outline of a ship anchored not too far offshore. It must be a ship that had arrived too late to be cleared by the authorities to dock at the harbor, he thought, just as would occur with the steamer that transported the murderer in his novel. The ship’s lights twinkled in the vast expanse of a darkening ocean. To his left, Biggers could see the winking yellow eye of the Diamond Head Lighthouse; to his right, the lanterns of swift Japanese sampans glowed intermittently. An idea suddenly dawned: he could write a novel in which the killer swims ashore from a ship docked beyond the harbor, commits the murder, and then swims back to the ship, allowing himself a perfect alibi. The idea became the basis for the murder plot in The House Without a Key.