Earl Derr Biggers is remembered today primarily for having created Charlie Chan, the Honolulu-based Chinese-Hawaiian policeman who starred in just six books and a very large number of (mostly B-grade) movies. Over the lifetime of this blog, I've reviewed all six of the Charlie Chan books, because I think he's one of the most enduring (and possibly most endearing as well) characters in American detective fiction. So, from the Classic Mysteries podcast, here's my (slightly edited) transcript of my review of Biggers's The Chinese Parrot (1926):
- 0 -
It should have been a pretty straightforward proposition for the San Francisco jeweler: deliver a string of pearls to a rich buyer at his desert ranch. But the pearls were very valuable, and there were some suspicious-looking characters on the prowl, so the jeweler elected to ask a friend to help deliver the pearls – a Chinese detective from Honolulu named Charlie Chan. That turns out to be the proverbial tip of the iceberg of a plot that culminates in murder. And it’s worth noting that our Chinese detective gets critical help from a most unlikely source: a parrot. It happens in The Chinese Parrot, by Earl Derr Biggers. First published in 1926, it was the second of Earl Derr Biggers’s six novels about Charlie Chan, the Honolulu-based detective of Chinese ancestry. It’s also, I think, one of the best of the Charlie Chan mysteries.
The story begins in San Francisco, where a wealthy woman comes to visit her good friend, a jeweler, trying to arrange for the sale of a valuable string of her pearls. The Phillimore Pearls have been in the family for many years, but the Phillimores are suffering from financial setbacks. As it happens, a very rich multi-millionaire, P. J. Madden, wants to buy the necklace. He wants it to be delivered to his desert ranch as a present for his daughter.
Now the pearls are in Honolulu – so another friend of the jeweler, the detective Charlie Chan, agrees to carry the pearls from Honolulu to San Francisco. Meanwhile, there is what appears to be a lot of suspicious interest in the movement of those valuable jewels. The result is that the jeweler sends his son, Bob Eden, and Charlie Chan to deliver the jewels jointly to the buyer’s desert ranch IF they find everything there is in order.
And that’s where things really start to happen – things including murder, to be sure. Charlie Chan goes undercover at the ranch, disguising himself as a Chinese-American cook. The local police are clearly incompetent – and racist, to boot; I’ll have more to say about that in a moment. But Charlie is able to solve a surprisingly large number of mysteries that appear to be interwoven with the fate of the pearls. And one of the primary clues to the whole case comes from a parrot – a parrot that knows how to mimic speakers in both English and a Chinese language (I presume Mandarin, but it’s not identified further in the book). It is that Chinese parrot that gives the book its title. And before the case is finished, the reader is likely to be very surprised by a number of the unexpected twists we will find in this excellent story.
Let me say a few words here about Charlie Chan and the perception – wrong, I think – that the original stories were demeaning to Asians and Asian-Americans. Mention the name “Charlie Chan” to most mystery lovers and they will think immediately of the long series of movies churned out during the first half of the 20th century. Most of those merely used the character of Charlie Chan, the detective of Chinese ancestry, a much-respected and honored member of the Honolulu police force. The stories in the movies were written by a variety of authors, mostly after the death of Earl Derr Biggers, and, frankly, the series got a lot sillier as it went on, particularly in the 1940s.
It is worth noting that the character of Charlie Chan in the movies – particularly the later ones – was far from the character as Biggers created him. The movies contain a fair amount of material which, to today’s viewers, is cringe-worthy: cheap racial jokes abound in too many of them. But when Biggers created his Chinese detective, he did so as a reaction against the kind of racial stereotyping of Asian characters all too common in detective fiction from the 1920s and 30s – an attitude summed up in the demeaning phrase, “The Yellow Peril,” fictional Asian villains bent on world domination. Asian characters, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, were largely confined to those villains and to subservient roles, their characters’ dialogue usually written in a kind of broken-English dialect.
So when Charlie Chan disguises himself as an itinerant cook in The Chinese Parrot, he is forced to use this terrible dialect as part of his disguise. At one point, he complains:
silly talk like that hard business for me…Chinese without accustomed dignity is like man without clothes – naked, and ashamed.
Well, Biggers goes out of his way to give Charlie Chan his dignity. It is the desert police (and a few other unsympathetic characters) who exhibit their racism – and who are made to look like the fools they are.
I think the Charlie Chan mysteries – and I am talking primarily about the books – are thoroughly enjoyable, presenting this hard-working detective as an intelligent hero who solves otherwise baffling crimes. And I think you’ll find that very much on display in The Chinese Parrot, where some of the twists are likely to leave you very surprised indeed.
- 0 -
You can listen to the complete podcast recording of this review by clicking here.
Next: Death from a Top Hat, by Clayton Rawson.
Comments