Earl Derr Biggers

• Born: August 26, 1884
• Birthplace: Warren, Ohio
• Died: April 5, 1933
• Place of death: Pasadena, California

Types of Plot: Police procedural; master sleuth

Principal Series: Charlie Chan, 1925-1932

Contribution

In Charlie Chan, Earl Derr Biggers created one of the most famous fictional detectives of all time. The amusing Chinese detective with the flowery, aphoristic language became widely known not only through the six novels in which he is featured but also through the many films in which he appeared. There were in fact more than thirty Charlie Chan films made from 1926 to 1952, not to mention some forty television episodes in 1957, a television feature in 1971, and a television cartoon series in 1972. In addition, in the 1930’s and 1940’s, there were radio plays and comic strips based on Biggers’s character. A paperback novel, Charlie Chan Returns, by Dennis Lynds, appeared in 1974. Chan has become an American literary folk hero to rank with Tom Sawyer and Tarzan of the Apes, and he has inspired the creation of numerous other “cross-cultural” detectives.

Biography

Earl Derr Biggers was born in Warren, Ohio, on August 26, 1884, to Robert J. Biggers and Emma Derr Biggers. He attended Harvard University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1907. He worked as a columnist and drama critic for the Boston Traveler from 1908 to 1912, when he was discharged for writing overly critical reviews. His first play, If You’re Only Human, was produced in 1912 but was not well received. That same year, he married Eleanor Ladd, with whom he remained married until he died. The couple had one child, Robert Ladd Biggers, born in 1915. His first novel, Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), a kind of farcical mystery-melodrama, was exceedingly popular, and in the same year a play by George M. Cohan based on the novel enjoyed even greater success; over the years, it inspired five different film versions.

In the next eleven years, Biggers was quite prolific. Aside from a number of short stories for such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, he wrote two short novels, Love Insurance (1914) and The Agony Column (1916), frothy romantic mysteries, and several plays, which enjoyed only moderate success. None of his plays was published.

In 1925 Biggers came into his own with the publication of the first Charlie Chan novel, The House Without a Key, first serialized, like all the other Chan novels, in The Saturday Evening Post. With the exception of one short novel, Fifty Candles (1926), after 1925 Biggers devoted himself exclusively to Chan, producing five more novels about him. Biggers died of a heart attack in Pasadena, California, on April 5, 1933. A volume of his short stories, Earl Derr Biggers Tells Ten Stories (1933), appeared posthumously.

Analysis

When Earl Derr Biggers wrote his first Charlie Chan novel, he had already been practicing his craft for a number of years. He had developed a smooth and readable colloquial style in the four novels and numerous short stories he had already published. In the several plays he had written or collaborated on, he had developed a knack for writing dialogue. Thus, he was at the peak of his literary powers in 1925, when Chan first burst into print in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post. All of his preceding novels had some characteristics of the mystery in them, but they would best be described as romantic melodramas rather than crime novels.

The Chan novels, particularly the earlier ones, are invested with the spirit of high romance and appeal to the natural human desire to escape the humdrum of everyday existence. Thus Biggers chooses exotic and picturesque settings for them: a Honolulu of narrow streets and dark alleys, of small cottages clinging to the slopes of Punchbowl Hill, and a Waikiki that in the 1920’s was still dominated by Diamond Head, not by high-rise hotels. He makes abundant use of moonlight on the surf, of palm trees swaying in the breeze, and of aromatic blooms scenting the subtropical evening. The streets are peopled with “quaint” Asians and the occasional native Hawaiian; the hotel lobbies house the white flotsam and jetsam of the South Seas in tired linens.

The reader is introduced to the speech of the Hawaiian residents, peppered with Hawaiian words such as aloha, pau, and malihini. Then, a part of this romantic picture, and at the same time contrasting with it, there is the rotund and humdrum figure of the small Chinese detective. In three of the novels Chan is on the mainland, seen against the fog swirling around a penthouse in San Francisco, in the infinite expanse of the California desert, and on the snow-clad banks of Lake Tahoe.

There is also a strong element of nostalgia in Biggers’s works. One is reminded, for example, of the good old days of the Hawaiian monarchy, when Kalakaua reigned from the throne room of Iolani Palace. Also, in San Francisco the loss of certain infamous saloons of the old Tenderloin is deplored, and in the desert the reader encounters the last vestiges of the once-prosperous mining boom in a down-at-heel cow town and an abandoned mine. Biggers delights in contrasting the wonders of nature with those of modern civilization, such as the radio and the long-distance telephone.

Parallel to the mystery plot, each novel features a love story between two of the central characters. The young man involved often feels the spirit of adventure in conflict with his prosaic way of life. This conflict is embodied in the person of John Quincy Winterslip of The House Without a Key, a blue-blooded Boston businessman who succumbs to the spell of the tropics and to the charms of an impoverished girl who resides in Waikiki. It is also present in Bob Eden of The Chinese Parrot (1926), the wastrel son of a rich jeweler who finds that there are attractions to be found in the desert and in connubial bliss that are not present in the bistros of San Francisco.

The heroines of these romances are usually proud and independent liberated women, concerned about their careers: Paula Wendell, of The Chinese Parrot, searches the desert for sites for motion pictures, while June Morrow, of Behind That Curtain (1928), is an assistant district attorney in San Francisco. They are torn between their careers and marriage and deplore the traditional feminine weaknesses. “I don’t belong to a fainting generation,” says Pamela Potter in Charlie Chan Carries On (1930), “I’m no weakling.” Leslie Beaton of Keeper of the Keys (1932) had “cared for a spineless, artistic brother; she had learned, meanwhile, to take care of herself.” Chan makes no secret of his belief that a woman’s place is in the home. In fact, although he seems to admire all these liberated women, at one point he remarks, “Women were not invented for heavy thinking.” Still, as the reader learns in Charlie Chan Carries On, he sends his daughter Rose to college on the mainland.

The House Without a Key

The first two novels are narrated mainly from the perspective of the other characters, rather than from that of Charlie Chan. That enables the author to present him as a quaint and unusual person. When he first comes on the scene in The House Without a Key, Biggers provides a full description: “He was very fat indeed, yet he walked with the light dainty step of a woman. His cheeks were as chubby as a baby’s, his skin ivory tinted, his black hair close-cropped, his amber eyes slanting.” When Minerva Winterslip, a Bostonian single woman, first sets eyes on him, she gasps because he is a detective. In popular American literature of the 1920’s, Chinese were depicted in the main either as cooks and laundrymen or sinister characters lurking in opium dens. Biggers consciously chose a Chinese detective for the novelty of it, perhaps inspired by his reading about a real-life Chinese detective in Honolulu, Chang Apana (Chang Ah Ping).

There is more than a little fun poked at Chan in the early novels. His girth is frequently mentioned. He is self-deprecatory and polite to others almost to the point of obsequiousness. He speaks in a bizarre mixture of flowery and broken English, leaving out articles and confusing singulars and plurals. The very first words he speaks in the series are odd: “No knife are present in neighborhood of crime.” Chan confuses prefixes, as in “unprobable,” “unconvenience,” “insanitary,” and “undubitably,” one of his favorite words, and is guilty of other linguistic transgressions. He spouts what are intended to be ancient Chinese maxims and aphorisms at every turn, sometimes quoting Confucius: “Death is the black camel that kneels unbid at every gate,” “It is always darkest underneath the lamp,” and “In time the grass becomes milk.” He is often underestimated, even scorned, by the whites with whom he comes into contact—Captain Flannery of the San Francisco police in Behind That Curtain is particularly unkind.

In spite of the amusement with which Biggers writes of him, Chan emerges as an admirable, sympathetic figure. He is kind, loyal, persistent, and tenacious. His Asian inscrutability is misleading, as his “bright black eyes” miss nothing. In spite of his rotundity, he is light on his feet and can sometimes act with remarkable agility. He is a keen student of human behavior—he has little use for scientific methods of detection, believing that the most effective way of determining guilt is through the observation of the suspects. “Chinese are psychic people,” Chan is fond of saying, and he frequently has hunches that stand him in good stead. He possesses great patience, a virtue with which he believes his race is more richly endowed than other races.

Chan was born in China, “in thatched hut by side of muddy river,” and at the beginning of the series has lived in Hawaii for twenty-five years. He resides on Punchbowl Hill with his wife, whom he met on Waikiki Beach, and children. Chan has nine children at the beginning of the series (eleven by the end). In his early years in Hawaii, Chan worked as a houseboy for a rich family. In The Chinese Parrot, when he masquerades as a cook, he has a chance to practice his cooking, although he believes that kitchen work is now beneath his dignity. He also masters an outrageous pidgin English, although it hurts his pride when he must affect it.

In the course of the series, Chan increases in dignity. He advances from sergeant to inspector, and his exploits become widely known. His English retains its quaint vocabulary but loses much of its earlier pidgin quality, except for the occasional omission of an article. Although the earlier works are told mainly from the perspective of the other characters, in the later ones the story is often told from the perspective of Chan himself. One reads what he sees and what passes through his mind. If this diminishes somewhat the quality of the superhuman, it makes him more human, so that instead of viewing him with a combination of awe and amusement, one can more readily identify with him.

It is instructive to compare two scenes that take place in Chan’s bungalow on Punchbowl Hill. In The House Without a Key he greets a visitor dressed in

a long loose robe of dark purple silk, which fitted closely at the neck and had wide sleeves. Beneath it showed wide trousers of the same material, and on his feet were shoes of silk, with thick felt soles. He was all Oriental now, suave and ingratiating but remote, and for the first time John Quincy was really conscious of the great gulf across which he and Chan shook hands.

The Black Camel

In an amusing chapter in The Black Camel (1929), the reader encounters Chan at breakfast. Here one finds that Henry Chan, his eldest son, is a man of the world, or at least is making his way in the field of business, and speaks in a slangy manner that causes Chan to wince. His two older daughters are more interested in the illusions of Hollywood than in anything else. They constitute a typical American family, in spite of their Asian origins. The reader also finds that Chan’s wife speaks the kind of pidgin that Chan so much decries in others and that he felt humiliated to have to affect when he was playing the part of the cook Ah Kim in The Chinese Parrot.

The Chinese Parrot and Behind That Curtain

There {/I} {/I} {/I} is some continuity in the novels apart from the character of Chan himself and a certain logic to justify Chan’s forays to the mainland, where Biggers probably thought he would have more scope for his talents than in the sleepy town of Honolulu in the 1920’s. In The Chinese Parrot, he travels to San Francisco to deliver an expensive necklace for an old friend who had employed him in his youth. He also travels to the desert as part of this same commission. In Behind That Curtain, Chan becomes embroiled in another mystery while waiting for the ship to take him home from the one he has just solved. At this time he meets Inspector Duff of Scotland Yard, whom he later meets in Honolulu, where Duff has gone to ferret out the perpetrator of a murder that has been committed in London. When Duff is wounded, Chan goes to San Francisco to catch the culprit. While in San Francisco he is hired by someone who has read in the papers of his exploits to go to Lake Tahoe to unravel a mystery for him.

Biggers’s mysteries tend to have the same romantic nature as his settings. They tend to involve relationships from the past, long-festering enmities or complicated plans for revenge or extortion. While they are never so fantastic as to be completely unbelievable, they are not realistic either. Biggers employs coincidence and such melodramatic devices as false identities, impersonations, and chance encounters.

In the spirit of the classical mystery of the 1920’s, Biggers more or less plays fair with his readers, allowing them to see clues that Chan alone has the perspicacity to interpret correctly. In the classical tradition, Chan reveals the killer in the final pages of the work. Biggers is good at building suspense, often by placing the life of one of the sympathetic characters in jeopardy. The mysteries are generally such that the reader has a strong idea as to the identity of the murderer long before the denouement, even if he cannot put his finger on the pertinent clue, and much of the suspense comes from waiting for the narrator to confirm a suspicion.

In a sense, the mysteries are secondary. They serve as a kind of backdrop for the romantic setting, the love affair that unfolds as the mystery is solved, and, above all, for the personality of Chan. It must be admitted that Chan’s status as a folk hero depends more on the cinema image projected by Warner Oland and Sidney Toler, and such catchphrases as “number one son” and “Correction, please,” than on the character portrayed in Biggers’s books. Still, the series has a lasting charm derived from the peculiar combination of mystery, romance, and gentle humor that Biggers achieved—and of the nostalgia they evoke for the Waikiki Beach and the Honolulu of the 1920’s.

Principal Series Character:

• Charlie Chan is a middle-aged Chinese detective on the police force in Honolulu, Hawaii. Short and stout, but agile, he advances from sergeant to inspector in the course of the series. He solves his cases through patience, attention to detail, and character analysis.

Bibliography

Breen, Jon L. “Charlie Chan: The Man Behind the Curtain.” Views and Reviews 6, no. 1 (Fall, 1974): 29-35. Discusses the fictional detective’s mystique and explains his reliance on that mystique to solve crimes.

Breen, Jon L. “Murder Number One: Earl Derr Biggers.” The New Republic 177 (July 30, 1977): 38-39. Review of Biggers’s contributions to detective fiction.

Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story. 1941. Reprint. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1984. Organizes the history of detective fiction into a “biography,” and situates Biggers’s works in relation to others in the narrative.

Penzler, Otto. Earl Derr Biggers’ Charlie Chan. New York: Mysterious Bookshop, 1999. Detailed study of Biggers’s most famous creation.

Penzler, Otto. The Private Lives of Private Eyes, Spies, Crime Fighters, and Other Good Guys. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1977. Examines the representation of the domestic space and experience of crime-fiction protagonists, comparing their private lives to the lives of those whose privacy they routinely violate in their investigations.

Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A post-structural analysis of the conventions of mystery and detective fiction. Examines 138 short stories and works from the 1840’s to the 1960’s. Helps place Biggers within the context of the genre.

Schrader, Richard J., ed. The Hoosier House: Bobbs-Merrill and Its Predecessors, 1850-1985—A Documentary Volume. Detroit: Gale, 2004. History of Biggers’s publisher; details Biggers’s career with Bobbs-Merrill, as well as the careers of such other authors as Ayn Rand, C. S. Forester, and L. Frank Baum. Bibliographic references and index.