Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History

by Huang, Yunte

  In this spartan office, Biggers finished writing his next Charlie Chan novel, The Chinese Parrot. By insatiable demand, Charlie appeared in the book as the central character, against the background of the stunning beauty of the California desert, which had been introduced to Biggers by a Connecticut senator, Charles C. Cook. As with the first book, the Saturday Evening Post serialized the second novel in 1926, and Bobbs-Merrill published it in a hardcover edition. The publisher sold 20,000 copies in six months, a 6,000-copy improvement over The House Without a Key.

  The year 1926 also saw the publication of S. S. Van Dine’s The Benson Murder Case, a book often touted as the beginning of the golden age of American mystery. Born Willard Huntington Wright in Charlottesville, Virginia, on October 15, 1888, Van Dine was the son of a rich family that made money from its vast real-estate holdings across California. First educated at St. Vincent College and then Pomona College, Van Dine entered Harvard in 1906. He was in the same class as T. S. Eliot and three years behind Earl Biggers. Intolerant of professors, Van Dine was soon expelled from Harvard for attending classes with a glass of absinthe perched on his chair to ease the tedium of lectures. In and out of jobs for more than a decade as a journalist, critic, and editor, Van Dine never made a splash in the literary pond until publication of The Benson Murder Case. It was said that he had become interested in crime novels after being confined to bed for cocaine addiction. He adopted his pseudonym in part from his mother’s maiden name, Van Vranken, and in part because, as he put it, “the steam ship initials summarized my desire to travel and I hoped that dine would at last turn into a verb. I had lived so many years without having had it in my vocabulary at all.”6 Indeed, Van Dine would not have to worry about his dinner bill again for a long time. The first edition of The Benson Murder Case sold out in the first week, and his next book, The “Canary” Murder Case (1927), broke all records for detective fiction, including the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, at the time.

  It may be true that Van Dine was more popular than Biggers in those years, but history proves that Biggers’s legacy—or, rather, Charlie Chan’s—is far more enduring. Published by Scribner’s, Van Dine’s novels set out to win the cultured public, as did the works of other authors groomed by Maxwell E. Perkins, who had been the editor for, among others, Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and a young Henry Roth. Van Dine’s hero, Philo Vance, is a wealthy, sophisticated New Yorker with a fund of knowledge so arcane that it requires footnotes.7 In contrast to aphorism-sputtering Charlie Chan, Philo Vance wears his foreign words on his sleeve and pretends to be far more versed in European languages than he actually is. Like T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, Philo Vance is a hero—or, to adopt the modernist parlance, an antihero—of the elite class. He is the inverse of Charlie Chan.

  Humble, self-effacing Charlie Chan captured the fancy of readers of a different sort. Forged out of the common stock, Chan has a much wider appeal than aristocratic Vance, and the Chan novels are not blood-dripping thrillers, but rather fine and subtle examples of detective fiction stretching back to Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, with a touch of comedy and romance added for the modern reader. The Chinese Parrot, for instance, mixes mystery with Western romance to perfection: California desert, ghost mining town, love story, and gunslinging. Contrary to Van Dine’s famously inept claim that “the detective story, in fact, is the only type of fiction that cannot be filmed,” The Chinese Parrot was readymade for Hollywood, and Chan’s adventures in the Wild West drew enthusiastic responses from the mystery/Western–hungry public. As Biggers reported happily to his Bobbs-Merrill publisher:

  I was much surprised a few days ago to open an express and find inside a large and deadly-looking six-shooter, which fairly screamed of the wide open spaces where men were men. It was accompanied by a letter which read: “This Battle Battered Betsy has been through many vicissitudes in many climes. She is rusty and creaks at the knees but will still belch fire and throw a mean bulk of lead. She is good for some years of active service and as a wall flower will defy time. Please accept Betsy as a slight token of my appreciation for the Bill Hart gun boost. Your Chinese Parrot is a corker.”8

  In October 1926, with the royalties piling up from his book sales, Biggers bought a lovely Spanish-style home in Pasadena. Located at 2000 East California Boulevard, the house, according to Biggers, “is made of remarkably good materials and is in a section where land values are certain to increase.” When I visited the address in the fall of 2008, just a few months after my field trip to Apana’s Kaimuki residence, a charming red-tiled, white-stucco–walled house still stood there, looking as if it had just been built.

  At the house, Biggers hired a Chinese servant named Gung Wong, about whom he would complain constantly. Despite the relocation to Southern California, Biggers continued to have bouts of illness and would be bedridden now and then. Wong obviously was not as good a houseboy as Charlie Chan. “During my six weeks in bed,” Biggers wrote in 1930, “I came into close contact, for the first time, with our Chinese boy, and I found him an unfeeling little devil—not much of a boost for Charlie.”9

  Thrilled with his success at being a literary Pygmalion, Biggers could no longer confine his Galatea-like invention of Chan to the mere pages between book covers. With Eleanor’s help, he featured his invented Chinaman on a New Year’s card that read: “For the New Year I warmly wish you plenty rice—since even the sunrise is without beauty to the hungry; plenty health—since even the road down hill is hard for the sick; and plenty peace of mind—since even trouble follows the restless like flies in the fifth month.”10

  When Homer Croy, a freelance writer and Chan aficionado, queried Biggers regarding the origin of the Chinese sleuth, Biggers actually responded with Charlie Chan’s idiosyncratic diction, in which the puckish detective carries on a dialogue with his “boss”:

  Boss looks me over, and puts me in novel, The House Without a Key. “You are minor character, always,” he explains. “No major feelings, please. The background is your province—keep as far back as is humanly possible.” Story starts to begin serial career, and public gets stirred up. They demand fuller view of my humble self. “What is the approximate date of beginning of next Charlie Chan story?” they inquire of the boss. And is my face red?

  Boss glares at me, plenty gloomy. “Good Lord!” he cries, “am I saddled with you for the remainder of my existence?”

  “You could be saddled with horse,” I bristle.

  “But how can I write of Chinese?” he demanded. “I know nothing of same. I could not distinguish Chinese man from Wall Street broker.”

  “Chinese would be the one who sold you the honest securities,” I elucidate.

  So the boss writes The Chinese Parrot, and Behind That Curtain….11

  Biggers was not alone in assuming the Charlie Chan persona. Apana, as mentioned earlier, was hardly offended by the sobriquet when he was addressed as “Charlie Chan” in the streets of Honolulu. The reification of this literary detective was complete when even officials at the Hawaii Tourist Bureau took part in the game, affecting Chan’s accent. George Armitage, head of the bureau, who had been in constant touch with the novelist, once sent Biggers a beautiful painting of Hawaii as a New Year’s gift, accompanied by a grammatically bludgeoned letter from “Charlie Chan”:

  Most Truly Friends:

  Most warm congratulations on most fruitful writings which now find place in book stores, news stands and drugs store all over world.

  My own pleasure is not to be worded that I, Charlie Chan, are honored to appear in most late book from pen which have made English language and story of mystery her slave and which tell of Honolulu and Waikiki which are spots of heartbreaking charm.

  It is greatest privilege for me, I would say, for I am before only policeman on small remuneration living on Punchbowl Hill with my happy wife and children, but fates have been in smiling mood and what we have now are plentiful. At present I have many promotions in Honolulu police department and sa
lary are so ample I have become proud owner of a home in Manoa Valley where rainbow smiles upon me. Children are now in Punahou School and University of Hawaii.

  I have unlimited yearning to see you, but duty remains duty so I must keep ever-open eye to detect criminals here. Gratitude are well known to me, however, and Mrs. Chan and I have talked with our children, and your friendship are a happy item on the golden scroll of memory so we ask you to receive a small gift from us. My University son and daughter are thinking a Hawaiian picture are most appropriate. Some things are not well-known to me, but, quoting old Chinese saying: “A picture is a voiceless poem,” so I am bowing before judgment of rising generation.

  Forget writing worries in California and come to Waikiki where we can float idle like leaves on stream.

  The honor of your company would pleasure me deeply.

  My final wish—the snowy, chilling days of winter and the scorching, windless days of summer—may they all be springtime for you.

  Your humbly servant,

  Charlie Chan12

  As Biggers told his publisher at Bobbs-Merrill, Armitage’s letter was “the best amateur effort in that line which I have seen.” High praise, indeed, from the author. But would we wish to consider how many more amateur efforts there have been since? Several generations of American schoolchildren in the coming decades would be the natural mimics of Charlie Chan, whom they saw on screens large and small. Of course, Biggers was fully cognizant of the commercial reasons why the Hawaii Tourist Bureau would want to keep up ties with a writer in Southern California. The future fiftieth state had always been well known for its true aloha spirit, but it had also been one of the savviest U.S. territories in promoting itself to attract traders and tourists alike. Ever since the annexation in 1898, the question of statehood had been in almost every Hawaiian’s mind. Territorial status had huge disadvantages. The governor of Hawaii was appointed by the president of the United States. The people of Hawaii could not take part in presidential elections. They could elect a territorial delegate to Congress, but the delegate had no vote in the House of Representatives. Hawaii paid taxes as if it were a state, but it was not entitled to all the federal benefits enjoyed by the states.13 Therefore, despite the opposition of some powerful local parties, almost every territorial legislature since 1903 had passed resolutions endorsing statehood. The U.S. Congress, however, had not been so keen on the idea of accepting into the Union a state dominated by an Asian population. As a result, the game of courtship and demurrals went on for decades.

  Over the years, Hawaii had built an impressive list of authors it could count as either adopted citizens or best friends. In 1908, on the occasion of the completion of Mark Twain’s Stormfield residence in Redding, Connecticut, and his seventy-third birthday, the Hawaii Promotion Committee sent him a mantelpiece and wall decoration carved out of Hawaiian koa wood. In return, Hawaii received from America’s most beloved writer a phrase that would become the best advertisement for the islands: “The loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean.”14 Jack London was also duly thanked for his thrilling description of surfing at Waikiki, which became instrumental in popularizing Hawaii’s “royal sport,” even though his candid stories about leprosy infuriated the islanders.

  The Charlie Chan books endeared Biggers to the people of Hawaii, and not just the haoles. As soon as the first installment of The House Without a Key appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on January 24, 1925, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin ran a lengthy review under the title “Writer Boosts Hawaii in Tale.” It praised Biggers’s publication “as good as anything a malihini [outsider] has done since Jack London lived in Hawaii.” The anonymous reviewer was impressed that a malihini writer “can spell pau and pilikia and wiki-wiki and papaya, and write a story in which not only all these words are correctly used, but one which is full of atmosphere and beauty and romance as well.”15 Upon the publication of the book by Bobbs-Merrill that spring, the same newspaper again gave it a glowing review, noting especially the free publicity for Hawaii in the book: “Biggers’ story was of great interest to the island people, especially residents of Honolulu, as it portrayed vividly the life of the city and its customs. No phase of the racial situation, the scenery, climate, music or customs, went without notice by the author. With several places of the city used as settings, Biggers fabricated a plot which contained the elements of a successful one—love and action.”16

  There was, however, some criticism of the book. Besides several factual errors involving Hawaiian names and customs, one chief concern was with Charlie Chan’s pidgin English. Chester A. Doyle, a veteran court interpreter who had, in his own words, “years of experience handling oriental criminals for the police department of Hawaii,” thought that Biggers’s book was “the bunk” and a “literary curiosity.” “No Chinese,” Doyle stated, “would use the language attributed to the Chinese detective.”17 Biggers replied to the charge in a letter sent to the Star-Bulletin: “I am sorry if Honolulu is still distressed by Charlie Chan’s way of putting things. As I told you, if he talked good English, as he naturally would, he would have no flavor…. In this dilemma, I turned to the way the Oriental mind sometimes works when its owners take pen in hand.”18

  Whether or not Biggers’s justification, employing the worst kind of Orientalist cliché, sounded convincing, Hawaii had the author to thank for the boost to its image. In April 1925, the Hawaii Tourist Bureau sent Biggers a huge koa-wood key—twenty-five inches long and six inches wide—with an inscription: “Hawaii is still the House Without a Key; you have it. Use it often.”19 In his reply, Biggers expressed his deep gratitude: “I am proud of the friends I have made in the islands, and prouder of this key than anything that has happened to me in 20 years of writing.” He added, “Most people who have been to Hawaii long to return, and in the future I shall long a bit more ardently than most.”20

  True to his words, Biggers would soon return to the islands.

  19

  A Meeting of East and West

  EARL DERR BIGGERS WITH A STAND-IN CHARLIE CHAN, JULY 1928 (Courtesy of Lilly Library, Indiana University)

  If Charlie Chan must have an original, he could not have a better one.

  —Earl Derr Biggers

  CONTRARY TO RUDYARD Kipling’s famous claim, the East and West do meet.

  On June 30, 1928, Earl Biggers and his family sailed for Honolulu on board the Malolo. With three best-selling Charlie Chan novels to his credit, Biggers was looking for new material, especially island material, for his future work. Since Chan’s two most recent exploits had taken place on the West Coast, fans had been asking when they would see the Honolulu sleuth in action again on his home turf. South Seas romance was, after all, one of the key ingredients in the tangy chop suey that made up a Charlie Chan mystery. As Biggers reminded his publisher when they were still discussing the promotion of the first book, The House Without a Key:

  I wanted to talk to you regarding the handling of this book. I haven’t any revolutionary ideas, but I felt that in pushing it it might be well to soft pedal murder and play up the setting. I have never mentioned Honolulu to anybody but heard what they said—“Oh, I have always wanted to go there” if they hadn’t already been. Mr. Leslie Hood of Vroman’s bookstore here, told me the other day that he couldn’t ask for a better setting than Honolulu in appealing to his clientele—unless it was Southern California. Of course he had to add that. But I do believe that the biggest point of appeal on this story will be the setting, and it may be that we can break through the ranks and sell a few outside the regular mystery story clientele by the Hawaii appeal. Certainly everyone who has been there will want the book—and there are lots of them. So I felt that in any advertising you might bring in the color stuff I didn’t get in the title—as for instance “The House Without a Key” stood by the white beach of Waikiki at the Crossroads of the Pacific, etc. etc. You might advertise it as a “Crossroads Puzzle.”1

  Biggers arrived in Honolulu just in time for the Inde
pendence Day fireworks, a long tradition started by American settlers in the early days of Kamehameha the Great. He was given a celebrity’s welcome by local residents and organizations. Hawaii newspapers reported his arrival on their front pages, as they did with other famous visitors: “After an absence of eight years, Earl Derr Biggers, famous author of The House Without a Key, The Chinese Parrot, Behind That Curtain, in which the now equally famous Chinese detective Charlie Chang [sic] solves deep mysteries, returned to Honolulu yesterday.” The city did have reason for gratitude, for, as the article continues, “Through Biggers’ popular mystery novels, Honolulu has received invaluable publicity all over the world, as Biggers reported that his books have been translated into leading languages of Europe and Chang is now known as well in Moscow as he is in Honolulu or San Francisco.”2