(1884-1933)
A Harvard-educated journalist and for many years a columnist at the Boston Herald, Biggers made his mark as a popular novelist at the age of 29 with a comic mystery called Seven Keys to Baldpate, about a mystery writer trying to get through the night at a seemingly haunted old inn. George M. Cohan (author of “Yankee Doodle Dandy”) turned the novel into a hit Broadway play that became a perennial favorite of small-town theater companies, and the property was subsequently turned into a motion picture no fewer than five times. But this was nothing compared to the welcome Hollywood gave to another of Biggers’s creations.
In 1925 the Saturday Evening Post serialized The House Without a Key, a mystery story about the murder of a wealthy old man and the solving of the crime by a sergeant in the Honolulu Police Department. The sergeant is a Chinese-American from the Hawaiian Territories, resident of Punchbowl Hill, a family man with a wife and 11 children; his baby-skinned, well-upholstered figure and his unassuming, unflappable demeanor veil the methods of an extremely wise and perspicacious policeman, whom Biggers soon promoted to Detective Inspector. His name is Charlie Chan.
The Chinese Parrot, Behind That Curtain, The Black Camel, Charlie Chan Carries On, and Keeper of the Keys. One of these, The Black Camel, concerned a murder on Charlie’s home ground, but other cases would take him away from Hawaii’s golden shores to California and to the decks of a San Francisco-bound cruise ship. The stories were all eminently readable (in the carefully constructed, bloodless way of pre-hard-boiled crime writing), and Chan—though often “offstage” for whole chapters—was a delight.
In an era when Asian characters in American popular fiction were represented as either the exotic, ghetto-dwelling creatures of Chinatown or as the evil representatives of a “Yellow Menace,” Chan, an educated, highly intelligent, respected officer of the law, represented a refreshing if not outright startling innovation. In choosing to write a contemporary mystery with an Asian protagonist and detective, Biggers had no particular interest in Asian culture to express and no sociological point to make. It was simply an entertainer’s notion, a gimmick that, so far as he knew, had never been done before. While some controversy now clings to the character— largely on the basis of the cinematic incarnations played by non-Asian actors, which some Asians have declared as racist stereotypes—Biggers’s Charlie Chan was a thoroughly admirable and distinguished figure. The comic underpinnings of the later movie series—such elements as slapstick and Chan’s sparring with his Number One Son, and the inauthentic and strained Oriental aphorisms—were largely absent from the novels (Big-gers tended to go for actual Confucian quotes). The literary series was ended abruptly at only six volumes when Biggers died suddenly in 1933 at age 49. “Death,” as the honorable Charlie Chan once said, “is the black camel that kneels unbidden at every gate.”
Works
- Agony Column, The (1916);
- Behind That Curtain (1928);
- Black Camel, The (1930);
- Charlie Chan Carries On (1931);
- Chinese Parrot, The (1926);
- Earl Derr Biggers Tells Ten Stories (1933);
- Fifty Candles (1926);
- House Without a Key, The (1925);
- Keeper of the Keys (1932);
- Love Insurance (1914);
- Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913)
