The name of Charlie Chan is one, I suspect, that still remains familiar to many mystery readers, especially those who enjoy books and movies from the American Golden Age period. In fact, the character of this Chinese-American detective is probably best known from those movies, and many of us grew up with them being rebroadcast (time after time after time) on television. So it's worth pointing out that Charlie Chan, the creation of novelist Earl Derr Biggers, appeared in only six books - and, when the detective's career began in 1925, with The House Without a Key, he was not intended to be the lead character in the mystery. He (and his author) have fallen somewhat out of favor over the years, but it seems rather unfair. I agree with critic Mike Grost, who notes (in the GAD Wiki), "it seems inaccurate and unjust to judge the original books by later film versions. Biggers worked hard to shatter racist stereotypes and replace them by positive images of Chinese people. He deserves credit for this, not blame."
Over the years, I have reviewed all six of the Charlie Chan books, both on this blog and on the Classic Mysteries podcast. Here's what I had to say about The House Without a Key on the podcast - as always, somewhat edited and brought up-to-date:
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A brutal murder in a mansion on a Hawaiian beach. A wristwatch with a luminous dial that has a dimmed-out number two. A respectable Boston family with a shameful secret. The remains of an unusual cigarette. A shipping notice torn from a newspaper. A page missing from a guestbook. These clues and others need to be sorted out, if that murder is to be solved. Fortunately, the investigator is a short, very round Chinese detective named Chan - Charlie Chan. The star of The House Without a Key, by Earl Derr Biggers.
I suspect that for most of us, our familiarity with Charlie Chan – if we are familiar with him at all – comes from the series of very popular movies that came out of Hollywood, mostly in the 1930s and 1940s, with Chan portrayed first by Warner Oland…then Sidney Toler…and finally Roland Winter. Most of the movies, not to put too fine a point on it, were grade-B productions, and poor Charlie Chan usually found himself doing his detecting in San Francisco or some other, unnamed, city, usually with a fair amount of what, by today’s standards, is racially insensitive dialog at best, spouting fake-Confucian aphorisms and boasting of his never-too-bright number one son.
But that’s not why Charlie Chan first became popular, and it’s certainly not a fair way to meet this fine Hawaiian detective. Charlie Chan appeared in six novels by mystery writer Earl Derr Biggers, and the character we see in those books bears little resemblance to the one we see in those movies that used to be a staple of late-night television. The House Without a Key was the first of those novels, published in 1925 – and Charlie Chan, while a major player, was hardly the center of the book.
That position belongs to a young man from Boston, John Quincy Winterslip, a member of an old Bostonian family, a bond salesman quite happy in his profession and engaged to another Bostonian blue-blood.
Young John Quincy is dispatched to Honolulu by his family in an effort to retrieve another family member, an aunt named Minerva Winterslip, who went out to the islands some time earlier and has shown no inclination to come home. She is living in the house of another Winterslip, Dan Winterslip, who is the proverbial black sheep of the family.
Again, this book was written in 1925, so John Quincy Winterslip couldn’t simply hop on a plane and arrive in Honolulu half a day later. He first had to take a train across the United States, spend some days with yet another Winterslip family member in San Francisco, and finally board a ship bound for Hawaii and Honolulu.
During the course of his journey, he begins to learn about the world outside Boston – a city presented in this novel as remarkably strait-laced and repressive. But his calm, rational world is shattered when he arrives in Honolulu to discover that there has been a murder – and that his family is deeply involved.
Enter the Honolulu police, in the person of a superior police captain named Hallet – and also represented by its most successful detective, Charlie Chan. Today’s readers will cringe a bit at the way in which the Bostonians initially look at the Chinese detective – but, again, these were the prejudices of the 1920s. It is worth noting that Biggers created his character as a deliberate rejection of the often overtly racist novels of the period which featured scheming Oriental villains plotting to conquer the world. At any rate, the Winterslip family is smart enough to realize quickly that Charlie Chan is quite shrewd and a very good detective, and one who has the respect and admiration of virtually everyone he encounters.
Which is good, because the clues which he must interpret are fairly obscure. As Charlie observes, the clues continually lead to dead ends…and so he must drop one and pick up another and try to follow it further. And he – aided by both John Quincy and his Aunt Minerva Winterslip – must thread their way through a series of increasingly odd and even dangerous events on their way to a startling solution to this case. And John Quincy will learn a great deal more about himself – and make some choices about his life that would have quite surprised him had he still been in Boston.
While Earl Derr Biggers and his detective Charlie Chan certainly were products of the American version of the Golden Age of detective fiction, it’s only fair to note that this author doesn’t always play by the rules. He shares few of his clues with the reader. In fact, John Quincy Winterslip stumbles upon the murderer because of a chance remark made by another character – and ultimately learns that Charlie Chan has also solved the case through a different set of clues, not shared with the reader until the very end of the novel.
That said, it is also true that many of the most delightful features of this book are in its description of Honolulu – and also San Francisco – and in John Quincy Winterslip’s awakening to some unexpected depths within himself. All of this makes The House Without a Key by Earl Derr Biggers an entertaining novel which is very much worth your while. It is still in print – and it’s also available in a number of electronic editions.
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You can listen to the original podcast by clicking here.
Next week: Three Witnesses, by Rex Stout.
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