Charlie Chan (plus a November wrapup)

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 now 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.

A Charlie Chan Pairup (#NonFicNov)

 

Week 3 (10-16 November) Book Pairings: This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or maybe it’s just two books you feel have a link, whatever they might be. You can be as creative as you like! Hosted by Liz.

I reread the first Charlie Chan mystery The House Without a Key a couple of weeks ago for the #1925Club. It reminded me there was a book I had wanted to read since I first heard of it:

 

It was really good! 

Huang first tells the story of Chang Apana, the Honolulu detective, who inspired the character of Charlie Chan. Apana was born in Hawaii to Chinese immigrant parents who went back to China when he was young. But Apana returned to Hawaii with an uncle, and then stayed. He worked as a cowboy, a house servant, the enforcer for the newly enacted statute against animal cruelty; then when the Honolulu police force was officially constituted, he became the only Chinese detective on the force. He seemed to have been good at all his jobs.

Huang then tells the story of Earl Derr Biggers. Biggers had grown up in Ohio to a middle class family. He worked as a journalist and had already become a successful author. But when in 1925 he published the first Charlie Chan novel, those earlier successes could no longer compare. Biggers wrote six Charlie Chan mysteries but died young of a heart attack.

Then there were the movies: there were three early movies, which went nowhere. In all of them Chan was played by a Japanese actor; it was only when Warner Oland (a Swede!) took on the role, they became a success. That's his picture on the cover lower right. (And Chang Apana in the upper left.) Oland's Chan was a huge success even in China, where he was mobbed when he made a publicity trip. And the Chinese were perfectly capable of scorning series they didn't like, such as those around Fu Manchu.

And Huang goes on to talk about the reception of the Charlie Chan character, and that was in some ways the most fascinating. Biggers admired the actual Chang Apana; they met a few times and their respect was mutual, and he intended Charlie Chan to be an antidote to all the Yellow Peril arguments of the time. But Chan talks in that pidgin: how can he be an admirable figure? Well, Huang demonstrates how it could be a whole lot worse. And Chan in the novels is competent and willing to stand up to prejudice when he sees it. Still in the 80s and 90s Chan was viewed as a stereotyped Asian whiz kid, or worse a yellow Uncle Tom, and nothing but cultural appropriation to boot.

Is that all he is? Of course, he is, partly. But Huang reminds us that much of American art comes about from a collision with somebody else's half-understood culture. This is perhaps most obvious in music (though not Huang's topic) and he rightly notes we'd have to give up a lot to achieve that sort of purity of the past.

Huang's includes a little of his own biography, which is fascinating. He was a student, majoring in English, at Peking University in 1989, and went to camp out in Tiananmen Square. But before the tanks rolled in, his parents lured him home by sending a telegram that his mother was dying. (She wasn't.)  Nevertheless he decided to emigrate, worked in lowly jobs in the US, until he decided to go back to school where he got a Ph.D. in English. As of the writing of the book (2010), he was teaching at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Huang clearly enjoys the Chan mystery series himself; he ends the book with a two page list of Charlie Chan aphorisms. Can't resist a few:

Hasty deduction, like ancient egg, look good from the outside. 

Man who flirt with dynamite sometime fly with angels.

Murder like potato chip--cannot stop at just one.

Some heads, like hard nuts, much better if well cracked.

Mind, like parachute, only function when open. 

I felt like it really added something to my earlier reread of the first Charlie Chan mystery. Does that mean I'm about to go reread them all? Careful examination reveal clue: bookmark in second volume of series!

If you have access to the New York Review of Books, the original review which caught my attention is here. 

 

Earl Derr Biggers' The House Without A Key (#1925Club)

"Amos!" cried Miss Minerva, "That man--why he--"

"Charlie Chan," Amos explained. "I'm glad they brought him. He's the best detective on the force."

 

1925 saw the first of the six Charlie Chan mystery novels. (And I don't know how many movies, etc...)

John Quincy Winterslip has left Boston to come to Honolulu to see what his Aunt Minerva is still doing there. Proper Bostonians don't go gallivanting off to the tropics and even though she's there to see her  cousins Dan and Amos Winterslip, it's time she come home.

But when John Quincy gets off the ship he learns Dan was murdered the night before. He also discovers that while Dan has been living an upright life for a while, he was a black sheep back in the 1880s, and there's still more than one person who would be happy to see him dead.

John Quincy's initial instinct is to pack up his Aunt Minerva and head back to Boston at once, but the Winterslip honour is at stake.

And anyway there's a girl, actually two girls, his distant cousin and Dan's daughter Barbara Winterslip, but more importantly Carlota Maria Egan, beautiful and also the daughter of a suspect.

It's a fun one in the Golden Age mystery tradition, more American than British, not an amateur detective, a few more chase scenes and a bit more violence. (A fist fight! An abduction with an escape!) John Quincy hangs out with Charlie Chan and comes to the correct solution, just a bit later than Chan and Chan has to rescue him. The romance is completely satisfactory.

In fact, really the only downside is that, though I last read it twenty-five years ago, I remembered the murderer and the solution. But I'm quite sure I didn't guess it the first time.

Biggers, already a professional writer, created Charlie Chan because he was impressed by an actual detective of Chinese ancestry on the Honolulu police force Chang Apana and disliked the whole idea of the Yellow Peril.

It's the 1925 Club week! Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting.

 

I see Fanda also read the novel and enjoyed it this week.