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| Not Pictured: Yunte Huang's Charlie Chan |
Charlie Chan
As threatened in my NonFicNovember post, I did carry on. When I first read the Charlie Chan mysteries about 25 years ago, I read them out of order as I happened to find the books. This time I read them in order. Not essential, but it does add something. Each one refers back to the events of the previous novel or even further back.
The first one has less of Charlie, but he was the most popular character, and fans wanted more of him in the books. Biggers supplied. There's not that much Hawaii, though, which I hadn't really thought about--only two and about a half of the books are set there. In the second, The Chinese Parrot of 1926, Charlie Chan has agreed to carry some pearls to the mainland for a friend; there's murder done in the valley near Bakersfield. In Behind That Curtain (1928) he's gotten as far as San Francisco on his way home when he's lured into another mystery. It's the former head of Scotland Yard who's murdered in this. Finally he's back home, when the movie star Shelagh Fane comes to Honolulu only to get murdered in The Black Camel (1929). A tour group is circling the world in Charlie Chan Carries On (1930) and a first murder occurs in London--"murder like potato chip--cannot stop at just one"--there's four dead (including another Scotland Yard man) by the time the tour group arrives in Honolulu. Charlie boards the ship with the tour group as it departs and has solved it by the time they reach San Francisco.
Biggers did live in California at the time, and only got to Hawaii a couple of times before his early death.
I just finished today the last one The Keeper of the Keys (1932), which is set in Truckee, California, on Lake Tahoe. Just across the border from Reno, Nevada, land of quickie divorces, which is an important plot element.
I'm not sure how much read the Charlie Chan mysteries are these days. There's plenty of casual racism (alas!) in Golden Age mysteries, anti-Semitism, anti-Black, etc., but it's an astonishingly a-historical reading to think these books are anti-Chinese. Prejudice exists in them; Chan confronts it when he sees it. Biggers was by his lights trying to improve the situation. In Keeper of the Keys, a number of Anglos are ready to dedicate a statue for benefits of Chinese immigration to California. Major Yammerton suspects and I would agree that the anti-Charlie Chan feeling is due more to the movies than the books, but Huang thought even the movies were defensible (and clearly liked them himself). Are they? I haven't see a Charlie Chan movie since I was eight and they came on after the Saturday morning cartoons. But thanks to the Major, I'm not aware they can be found at YouTube.
Novellas in November
I read two: Cesare Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires and Machado de Assis' The Alienist. Blogged about them here.
Pynchon
I reread Gravity's Rainbow and have subsequently finished rereading Vineland. Shadow Ticket is on the stack. Pynchon post coming soon? Well there is the Doorstoppers in December challenge going on:
Literary Criticism
I read Robert Boyers' memoir Maestros and Monsters about his relationship with Susan Sontag and George Steiner. Boyers is the founding editor of the little magazine Salmagundi and knew both Sontag and Steiner for years in that context. It's a defense of literary criticism for a readerly, but non-specialist audience (me) as well as being amusingly gossipy about both of them, who could be quite difficult in person. I've read or reread most of Sontag pretty recently. It made me want to go read those Steiner books I haven't read.
MARM
I also reread Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin for Buried in Print's Margaret Atwood Reading Month, though I didn't finish it until this month (so it didn't make the picture). It would be another doorstopper, though...
That was my month of reading. Did you take part in any of the November challenges? For December, in addition to any doorstoppers, there's also Dean Street Decmber, which I hope to read something for.
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