Laughing Detective

Keye Luke, Warner Oland, 1937

John Springer Collection/CORBIS

Charlie Chan

The Untold Story
of the Honorable Detective
and His Rendezvous
with American History

by Yunte Huang
Norton, 354 pp., $26.95

Making the Detective Story American

Biggers, Van Dine and
Hammett and the Turning Point of the Genre,
1925-1930

by J.K. Van Dover
McFarland, 231 pp., $35

In the 1920s, by our standards, America was a racist land. The image of the Chinese, who were explicitly excluded from immigration, was defined in fiction and media by sinister villains, comic servants, and laundrymen. A popular writer from Ohio introduced a character who would be loved by millions while giving the lie to every negative cliché about the Chinese. For his trouble, he would be posthumously reviled by some Asian Americans as a pernicious racist, and his creation as an undesirable stereotype. Over the years, many non-Asian defenders have protested this unfairness, but in the end, only a Chinese scholar could definitively set the record straight about Earl Derr Biggers and Charlie Chan.

Biggers (1884-1933) wrote six novels about the Honolulu policeman Chan, from The House Without a Key (1925) to Keeper of the Keys (1932). Between 1926 and 1949, Chan would be a character in 47 films, including two silents and one early talkie in which he was reduced to a minor role. In the 44-film Chan series, he would be played by three actors—most definitively Warner Oland, most frequently by Sidney Toler, least notably by Roland Winters—who had one significant feature in common: none was Asian, or Asian American. This fact was the principal reason for Asian-American hostility to Charlie Chan.