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Making the Detective Story American: Biggers, Van Dine and Hammett and the Turning Point of the Genre, 1925-1930

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Much-ballyhooed this year has been Yunte Huang's Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History, but another book, the publication of a scholarly rather than commercial imprint, is of no less importance, Making the Detective Story American: Biggers, Van Dine and Hammett and the Turning Point of the Genre, 1925-1930 by J. Kenneth Van Dover. In this quieter, less self-centered study, Chan shares the stage with fellow 1920s American sleuth creations Philo Vance and the Continental Op, and Van Dover`s focus is on the literary origin of Chan, rather than the subsequent film series.

The inspiration of Chan itself is contested, with some arguing that because there was a celebrated Honolulu detective named Chang Apana, he must have provided the source. However, the concentration on Apana diminishes the importance of how Chinese-American issues were impinging on the broader white majority (even if in restrictive laws and exploitive narratives), and there is nothing in common between the methods or personalities of Apana and Chan. Other than his status as a Chinese immigrant and a detective with the Honolulu police, the tough, whip-wielding Apana, mixing it up with Honolulu gangs, is a contrast with the literary and filmic creation of Charlie Chan. While Earl Derr Biggers acknowledged reading a newspaper notice about Apana as he began to write of his new character, in another novel several years earlier Biggers had already provided ample evidence of his sympathetic concern with the position of the Chinese in America. He was not enunciating a political agenda, as befit a Midwestern native catering to the popular fiction magazines for his living, but Biggers did publicly avow his challenge to Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu, revolutionizing the stereotype by creating its antithesis. Chan appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, competing for the same readers as Fu Manchu's simultaneous evildoing in Collier's.

Chan was notable for his lack of eccentricities, unlike another popular detective of his day for whom English was also a second language, Hercule Poirot. As Van Dover points out, the English of Poirot and Chan are similar; "pidgin" was another dialect altogether, not used by Biggers's creation. Unlike the more traditional cold and aloof Sherlock Holmes-style investigator that set the pattern for the ratiocinative mystery, Chan appealed to audiences for his humanity. In contrast with nearly all sleuths, central to Chan's life is his family, and it is the transition from an immigrant to the first generation of Chinese-American children that provides the backdrop to his exploits, the literal heart of the novels. Filmmakers subsequently made this element even more vital by pairing Chan with one or more of his children in solving his cases, thereby also enhancing the contrast between them in assimilation into American society.

While some find it unpalatable that it was a Caucasian author who first provided a filtered but still positive examination of Chinese culture, this was inevitable given the era and a readership for whom the very idea of a Chinese hero, and one on the side of the law, was a novelty. Biggers, for his part, died of heart failure at age 48 after writing six novels, just as their screen adaptations were overshadowing the books. While it may have been probable that Caucasian actors in yellowface would become the screen incarnations of a Chan series, the first two Chan films, silents which are lost today, cast Japanese actors in the role.

Author Van Dover subtly exposes these issues with an illuminating reading of the novels, understanding the generic limitations which Biggers expanded through his creation. So too, in providing the context, Van Dover indicates the fundamental paradox of much of the Chan criticism: he was not bare-knuckled but cerebral, and to fault the character as lacking martial arts kinetics and thus somehow lacking in masculinity (despite fathering a dozen children) is to fundamentally misunderstand the detective tradition in which he functioned. Biggers wrote for the family audience of the Saturday Evening Post, not Black Mask--and at a time when tales of Chinatown perils were a pulp mainstay. Chan was polite, humble, but never self-effacing or servile, drawing his strength from his gentle, insightful manner. He is esteemed by individuals of all races, or else characters learn to change their preconceptions; he pinpoints the criminal--invariably a white who has eluded detection by police of their own race. This was a depiction of race relations that sharply contrasted with portrayals of African-Americans in the same era, especially on the screen. As a nexus of cultural transition, Chan did not lack for temperament, and the racism he faced was an undercurrent throughout the novels. Only in failing to recognize this dynamic in the second Chan book, The Chinese Parrot, offering a constant interplay between the detective and Chinese stereotypes and the resulting prejudice, is Van Dover's analysis faulty. (A biographical appendix on Biggers is an invaluable adjunct.)

Hopefully the polemicists on the Chan question will not only view the films, but also read how the phenomenon began in the novels, which were reprinted just two years ago. In this way, as Van Dover argues, not only did a historical shift in the mystery genre occur, but also the first major, positive Chinese literary portrayal in American letters. The Biggers creation marked a very real turning away from the normative treatment of Asians as threatening and evil. And this in a series of books that well repay reading in their own right, as evergreen, expert whodunit entertaintment--with a hero of enduring charm, wit, and sagacity who has retained his popularity for 85 years.