[In the following essay, Breen studies the development of Charlie Chan as a leading character in the six novels by Biggers.]

With the exception of a couple of Dashiell Hammett characters, Sam Spade and Nick Charles, no character in detective fiction has become more famous on the basis of fewer official appearances than Earl Derr Biggers's Chinese sleuth Charlie Chan. The Honolulu policeman appeared in only six novels, beginning with The House Without a Key (1925), in which he is a comparatively minor character, and ending with The Keeper of the Keys (1932), by which time he has taken over center stage.

As with Spade and Charles, most of Chan's fame has been spread through hundreds of apocryphal cases in films, radio, television, and comic strips. As entertaining as many of these adaptations are, they have done Chan and his creator a disservice. The Charlie Chan of the six novels is a complex, multifaceted character. His screen equivalent is a smug, infallible quotation-spouter.

The greatest irony is that Chan has come to be regarded as an ethnic stereotype in some quarters. At the time of his creation, he represented a deliberate corrective to the sinister and villainous figures, most notably exemplified by Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu, that typified the Chinese to readers of popular fiction in the '20s and before.

In an era when a popular song could present with a straight face a line like "In Limehouse, where yellow chinkies love to play," Biggers's sensitivity and commitment to racial understanding were exceptional. Early in the series, he uses the term Chinaman in third person narration, but the last book he has come to realize that the term is an offensive one to the Chinese. When a character uses the word, Chan takes it as an insult only because he knows it is intended that way.

Earl Derr Biggers was already well-established as a skilled and successful writer long before he created Charlie Chan. Born in Warren, Ohio, in 1884 and educated at Harvard, he served for several years as a columnist and drama critic for the Boston Traveler before the 1913 novel Seven Keys to Baldpate gave him his first fame. George M. Cohan would turn Baldpate, a light romance with a touch of mystery, into a successful stage vehicle. Biggers moved to New York to write plays of his own, as well as such novels as Love Insurance (1914) and The Agony Column (1916).

Like most successful popular writers, Biggers strongly believed in what he was doing. He claimed that editors never told him what to write, just asked him to do the best job he could. They probably didn't have to tell him, since his inclinations as a writer were so much in accord with the requirements of slick romantic fiction of the day. In his Harvard days, he was notorious among his classmates for preferring Kipling and Richard Harding Davis to Fielding, Smollett, and Richardson. According to his New York Times obituary, "Biggers said they read Keats to one another in the twilight at Harvard at that time, urging him to leave the room before they began."

Delicate health and the promise of film work led Biggers to move his family to California in the mid-'20s. By this time, Charlie Chan had made his debut but was not yet a world-famous character. By the time of Biggers's death in 1933, Warner Oland was solidly established as the definitive screen Chan and the Chinese sleuth occupied most of his creator's writing efforts.

All six Charlie Chan novels were serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, and a perusal of the illustrations charts Chan's growing fame. When The House Without a Key began its run in the September 24, 1925 issue, Chan did not appear in the first installment, and even when he did make his unobtrusive debut in the second installment, illustrator William Liepse was too preoccupied with the story's young lovers to offer a visual depiction of him. W. H. D. Koerner's illustrations for the second novel, The Chinese Parrot (1926), show Chan as youngish, not very fat and clean-shaven. The lack of a mustache is true to Biggers's descriptions of Chan—like Fu Manchu, he acquired facial hair for film work. By the appearance of the fifth novel, Charlie Chan Carries On (1930), artist Henry Raleigh gives us a Chan with the look of the movies about him. He has become much fatter, acquired dramatically sloping eyebrows, and grown a mustache much like Warner Oland's.

Aside from the superficial matter of a mustache, how does Chan in the books differ from Chan in the movies? He does have a large number of children, thoroughly Americanized in their speech and partially so in their values, but they stay on Punchbowl Hill. They don't dog their famous father's footsteps shouting, "Hey, Pop, I got a swell clue," nor are they ever referred to by such labels as "number-one son."

A Japanese policeman named Kashima, ambitious but inept, serves a comic relief role in some of the novels similar to that of the sons in the movies. Kashima serves to illustrate the most unattractive aspect of Chan's character. Himself the target of racial prejudice, subtle and otherwise, in all the novels, he vents his own irrational bigotry toward the Japanese on Kashima.

It is the conflict of Eastern and Western values that makes Charlie Chan an interesting character. He criticizes the ambition, the curiosity, the lack of tranquility of the Caucasian, but he sees more and more of these unworthy attributes in himself and is worried by it. Proud of his own vocabulary and command of the English language, he is upset by his offspring's use of slang. Listening to the pidgin English of a Chinese servant, he is torn between shame at the indignity of the man's condition and the feeling that somehow he has retained a basic Chinese identity that Chan has lost. Visiting the head of his family association in San Francisco, he is excoriated for his association with the "foreign devil police." Proud that his children are American citizens, he is ambivalent about his own nationality.

Chan's speech patterns change and develop in the course of the series. His first line of dialogue, "No knife are present in neighborhood of crime," illustrates a grammatical problem that will disappear by the third book in the series. In the first book, he is more given to picturesque language than to aphorisms and quotations. He says, "Is it that you are in the mood to dry up a plate of soup?" And, "Stone walls are crumbling now like dust. Through many loopholes light stream in like rosy streaks of dawn." And, at a dramatic moment, "Relinquish the fire arms … or I am forced to make fatal insertion in vital organ belonging to you."

In The Chinese Parrot, Chan must impersonate a Chinese servant, speaking such lines as, "Maybe you wantee catch 'um moah fiah, hey, boss?" It is painful to him—"All my life, I study to speak fine English words. Now I must strangle all such in my throat, lest suspicion rouse up." He draws the line at saying "velly." Only with the third novel, Behind That Curtain (1928), does he begin to fill the air with Chinese proverbs like "Falling hurts least those who fly low." Perhaps influenced by the movies, his quotation-spouting reaches its height in the last novel: "Only the thief oils his wheelbarrow." "The fool in a hurry drinks his tea with a fork." "Eggs should not dance with stones."

Biggers's strengths as a writer were his gently humorous style and his ability to bring his characters to life within the limits of commercial fiction. As a creator of mystery plots, he was not in a class with his contemporaries S. S. Van Dine and Ellery Queen. Though he would throw a paltry clue or two the reader's way on occasion, fair play was not manifest in most of his novels. Where Van Dine decreed there must be no love interest to detract from the ratiocination, with Biggers there was always a love interest, though it became less central as Charlie Chan's part grew larger. Only in The Black Camel (1929), perhaps the best all around Chan novel, is there a gathering-of-the-suspects scene of the kind familiar from the Chan films.

In the last novel of the series, perhaps showing the belated influence of Van Dine and Queen, Biggers begins to show an interest in the fair play aspect of detective story writing, carefully showcasing his clues. Had he lived to write more Chan novels, they surely would have been more tightly and deviously plotted than their predecessors and would have enhanced Biggers's reputation with such purists as Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, who dismiss him with one perfunctory paragraph in their massive bibliography, A Catalogue of Crime (1971). But improved craftsmanship would not have changed Biggers's greatest achievement: the creation of one of the immortal fictional detectives.